economics experts remotasks

economics experts remotasks

The Role of Economics Experts in Remote Task Platforms

1. Introduction to Remote Task Platforms

Remote task platforms (RTPs in short) provide intermediation between workers offering to perform tasks and those seeking some tasks to be done. Such platforms disintermediate the provision of remote digital services that typically would take place through job markets, including labor markets, or outsourcing firms. RTPs offer typically a relatively simple platform on which the tasks are announced and which implements the exchange. RTPs are often associated with labor on tap or crowd work. In this context, some tasks are split into small units, which are easy to execute. Workers perform these micro-tasks and receive small amounts of payment.

Popular RTPs include Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower (which was renamed to Figure Eight), Clickworker, Microworkers, and many more. The major platform that emphasizes that crowd tasks are performed in a highly skilled capacity is Topcoder. Work can be solely virtual (and in that regard platform-mediated), but on Mechanical Turk there is evidence that many Turkers want to collaborate with other Turkers in a local physical context. A substantial number of tasks on RTPs involve more complex work in the field of artificial intelligence and other programming and data manipulation. Platforms are now emerging that specialize in such higher-skill tasks, which we will call remote task-based job markets (RTJMs). These include Corelaborate, Codementor, and Rev.

2. The Importance of Economics Experts in Remote Task Platforms

Remote task platforms are at the forefront of the ongoing transformation in how we think about jobs and work. They have the potential to change how work is organized, collaboratively solving big, hard, complex problems, and addressing inequities in communities. These platforms take many forms, differing by the nature of the work being done and the skills and employment terms of those performing the work.

This paper examines expert sites, where experts who typically hold the necessary credentials to do their work in a traditional brick-and-mortar employment setting engage in fee-for-service work. When conducted off of any needs-based platform, this type of work is referred to as knowledge work, and people doing this work are typically called professionals.

While we provide general guidance applicable to many expert sites and even to knowledge work in general, we focus our discussion on a subset of expert sites that use deep algorithms, which bring data-driven decision-making to both knowledge-seeking workers and task-originating individuals. Often, an underlying goal for twenty-first century expertise immersion is to provide professional expert advice remotely via expert sites or system interfaces.

For twenty-first century expert sites that shift activities from physical environments to virtual ones, we are left with the challenge of deciding which expert attributes are essential for successful interaction and an initial set of decision metrics for determining selection requirements.

3. Challenges and Opportunities for Economics Experts in Remote Task Platforms

Remote task platforms (RTP) intermediaries facilitate task-based work between employers and workers. Market forces determine the price of an RTP task. In well-functioning markets, efficient prices reward workers for the value they contribute to the employer’s project. Setting this value can be difficult. Tasks are often unfamiliar, and the workers who could perform them remain anonymous until hired.

Economics experts excel in setting prices in this lucrative and growing labor market. They often are against the platforms’ interests by reducing labor market profits. Still, RTP platforms need U.S.-based experts who can confidently assess task value, establish efficient prices, and work profitably with employers and clients. As a result, platforms permit verifiably skilled workers to communicate with employers before a hiring decision. This paper provides an empirical exploration of the wages that these workers earn, the labor market for their services, and the characteristics of these markets.

4. Best Practices and Strategies for Economics Experts in Remote Task Platforms

In this section, we provide recommendations for economic experts, given the challenges we describe above. As a starting point, economics experts on remote task platforms should follow established best practices in academic research. They should use proper statistical techniques, ethical considerations, and transparent methodology. Although these tasks are typically low cost, low stakes, and posted to large numbers of workers, we generally abide by the same ethical expectations as researchers engaged in other types of experiments. Workers’ time should be compensated fairly with consent, and they should be informed about the objectives of the study. Researchers should also keep in mind that by posting tasks via a publicly observable channel, they not only recruit subjects to participate in their tasks but they may also signal or reveal the tasks to other fairly paid subjects. Researchers should consult the guidelines for ethical IRB oversight of experiments and the 2014 AER and recently updated Research Results Impact Guidelines by the Research Transparency and Reproducibility Initiative to ensure that their activities adhere to current best practices for research transparency.

Most traditional research practices cost money, such as holding subject pools at expensive in-person experimental labs. In contrast, posting and administering some tasks on remote task platforms are nearly free. As a result, it is important to keep in mind that the relative costs matter. The guiding principle for cost-effective strategies seems to be: Be frugal, but not at the expense of standard ethical guidelines. Although costs are substantially lower on remote task platforms and subjects are not pooled and held, the experts who oversee the tasks are comparably paid or higher paid, since the work that they perform on the platforms requires higher levels of responsibility and judgment, yet can yield levels of self-satisfaction and contribution to the cumulative knowledge that are quite high. On today’s markets, qualified individuals who are involved in research are paid fairly and appropriately for their work. It is important to keep in mind, though, that the transitioning to remote task platforms opens up a pinch point in the cost structure—the labor of the economics expert who oversees the tasks—that offers an alternative source of cost savings.