Although I heard about online recruiting a lot, I have not heard about MT before. So, Amazon really does everything! Which company will be out of business after ToysRus? Well, this is not a point here…
As described by Mason and Suri (2012), researchers can use this HR pool for their studies. We are always hungry for subjects! We want a cheap and large sample size. Plus, quality! Hmm…Yes, quality matters...So, who came to MT for money? Do we have the statistics? Will they be really honest and sincere in conducting a survey or participating in the experiments if they get more incentives? There are a lot of reliability and validity issues. If researchers recruit people for interview transcripts, privacy also matters as Vanessa commented in our discussion. Do we have to include this item in the consent form?
I just talked about some limitations on researchers’ side. However, the most controversial issue around MK is whether it is exploiting low-income workers. Researchers are also ones to blame for this matter. Mason and Suri (2011) highlighted the low cost as one of the benefits, but this is one of the reasons why Jeff Bezos is criticized.
“Workers tend to receive extremely low pay for their cognitive piecework, on the order of pennies per task. They usually earn no benefits and enjoy no job security.” (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has Reinvented Research)
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