| A self-interested, economically rational business would hire the worker for $1.50 an hour. This assumes that MTurk is an exact substitute. It isn't even close. I know of a person who made this exact choice - instead of going lean and using MTurk at $1.50/hour, he is paying close to $5/hour (loaded cost, wage is probably about $2.50) for live humans and suffering with monthly contracts and renting office space. (I'm helping him with the data analysis.) Among other things, with a single turk at $1.5/hour, you need to hire 2 more turks each at $1.5/hour and get a majority vote on their work. You also need to hope you didn't hire two colluding spammers. You don't get to give them live, in-person training, and checking work is more difficult. Then there are statistical issues. If you have 10,000 HITs produced by 100 turks, you need to check 100 x 15=1500 HITs and you have a low confidence that any individual turk did a good job. If you have 10,000 HITs produced by a single employee, you can check 200 HITs and get a much higher confidence rate. Do this for a few rounds, you now have a set of employees who you can trust. Additionally, you can control when the work is done. If something is important, it will be done in precisely #HITs / (employees x HIT rate) hours. On MTurk, you hope it will eventually be done one day. 0% unemployment with an average low-income wage of $0.50 is not 'better' than 5% unemployment with an average low-income wage of $7. The average low income wage in the US is far lower than $7. Most poor adults (about 70%) have a wage of $0 due to having no job. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf |