Work

Monopsony in Online Labor Markets

Year: 2018

Type: preprint

Abstract: On-demand labor platforms make up a large part of the “gig economy.” We quantify the extent of monopsony power in one of the largest on-demand labor platforms, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), by measuring the elasticity of labor supply facing the requester (employer) using both observational and experimental variation in wages. We isolate plausibly exogenous variation in rewards using a double-machine-learning estimator applied to a large dataset of scraped MTurk tasks. We also re-analyze data from 5 MTurk experiments that randomized payments to obtain corresponding experimental estimates. Both approaches yield uniformly low labor supply elasticities, around 0.1, with little heterogeneity.

Source: RePEc: Research Papers in Economics

Authors: Arindrajit Dubé, Jeff Jacobs, Suresh Naidu, Siddharth Suri

Institutions: University of Massachusetts Amherst, Columbia University, Microsoft (United States), Microsoft Research New York City (United States)

Language: English

Topic: Digital Economy and Work Transformation

Subfield: Sociology and Political Science

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Decent work and economic growth

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W3122252777

Cites:

Cited by: 7

Related to: 10