Paying Crowd Workers for Collaborative Work

Collaborative crowdsourcing tasks allow crowd workers to solve problems that they could not handle alone, but worker motivation in these tasks is not well understood. In this paper, we study how to motivate groups of workers by paying them equitably. To this end, we characterize existing collaborative tasks based on the types of information available to crowd workers. Then, we apply concepts from equity theory to show how fair payments relate to worker motivation, and we propose two theoretically grounded classes of fair payments. Finally, we run two experiments using an audio transcription task on Amazon Mechanical Turk to understand how workers perceive these payments. Our results show that workers recognize fair and unfair payment divisions, but are biased toward payments that reward them more. Additionally, our data suggests that fair payments could lead to a small increase in worker effort. These results inform the design of future collaborative crowdsourcing tasks.