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Hourly Wages in Crowdworking: A Meta-Analysis

In the past decade, crowdworking on online labor market platforms has become an important source of income for a growing number of people worldwide. This development has led to increasing political and scholarly interest in the wages people can earn on such platforms. This study extends the literatu...

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Autores principales: Hornuf, Lars, Vrankar, Daniel
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9425816/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12599-022-00769-5
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author Hornuf, Lars
Vrankar, Daniel
author_facet Hornuf, Lars
Vrankar, Daniel
author_sort Hornuf, Lars
collection PubMed
description In the past decade, crowdworking on online labor market platforms has become an important source of income for a growing number of people worldwide. This development has led to increasing political and scholarly interest in the wages people can earn on such platforms. This study extends the literature, which is often based on a single platform, region, or category of crowdworking, through a meta-analysis of prevalent hourly wages. After a systematic literature search, the paper considers 22 primary empirical studies, including 105 wages and 76,765 data points from 22 platforms, eight different countries, and 10 years. It is found that, on average, microtasks results in an hourly wage of less than $6. This wage is significantly lower than the mean wage of online freelancers, which is roughly three times higher when not factoring in unpaid work. Hourly wages accounting for unpaid work, such as searching for tasks and communicating with requesters, tend to be significantly lower than wages not considering unpaid work. Legislators and researchers evaluating wages in crowdworking need to be aware of this bias when assessing hourly wages, given that the majority of literature does not account for the effect of unpaid work time on crowdworking wages. To foster the comparability of different research results, the article suggests that scholars consider a wage correction factor to account for unpaid work. Finally, researchers should be aware that remuneration and work processes on crowdworking platforms can systematically affect the data collection method and inclusion of unpaid work. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12599-022-00769-5.
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spelling pubmed-94258162022-08-30 Hourly Wages in Crowdworking: A Meta-Analysis Hornuf, Lars Vrankar, Daniel Bus Inf Syst Eng Research Paper In the past decade, crowdworking on online labor market platforms has become an important source of income for a growing number of people worldwide. This development has led to increasing political and scholarly interest in the wages people can earn on such platforms. This study extends the literature, which is often based on a single platform, region, or category of crowdworking, through a meta-analysis of prevalent hourly wages. After a systematic literature search, the paper considers 22 primary empirical studies, including 105 wages and 76,765 data points from 22 platforms, eight different countries, and 10 years. It is found that, on average, microtasks results in an hourly wage of less than $6. This wage is significantly lower than the mean wage of online freelancers, which is roughly three times higher when not factoring in unpaid work. Hourly wages accounting for unpaid work, such as searching for tasks and communicating with requesters, tend to be significantly lower than wages not considering unpaid work. Legislators and researchers evaluating wages in crowdworking need to be aware of this bias when assessing hourly wages, given that the majority of literature does not account for the effect of unpaid work time on crowdworking wages. To foster the comparability of different research results, the article suggests that scholars consider a wage correction factor to account for unpaid work. Finally, researchers should be aware that remuneration and work processes on crowdworking platforms can systematically affect the data collection method and inclusion of unpaid work. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12599-022-00769-5. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2022-08-30 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC9425816/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12599-022-00769-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Research Paper
Hornuf, Lars
Vrankar, Daniel
Hourly Wages in Crowdworking: A Meta-Analysis
title Hourly Wages in Crowdworking: A Meta-Analysis
title_full Hourly Wages in Crowdworking: A Meta-Analysis
title_fullStr Hourly Wages in Crowdworking: A Meta-Analysis
title_full_unstemmed Hourly Wages in Crowdworking: A Meta-Analysis
title_short Hourly Wages in Crowdworking: A Meta-Analysis
title_sort hourly wages in crowdworking: a meta-analysis
topic Research Paper
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9425816/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12599-022-00769-5
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