Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Monopsony in Online Labor Markets†

Monopsony in Online Labor Markets† AbstractDespite the seemingly low switching and search costs of on-demand labor markets like Amazon Mechanical Turk, we find substantial monopsony power, as measured by the elasticity of labor supply facing the requester (employer). We isolate plausibly exogenous variation in rewards using a double machine learning estimator applied to a large dataset of scraped MTurk tasks. We also reanalyze data from five MTurk experiments that randomized payments to obtain corresponding experimental estimates. Both approaches yield uniformly low labor supply elasticities, around 0.1, with little heterogeneity. Our results suggest monopsony might also be present even in putatively “thick” labor markets. (JEL C44, J22, J23, J42) http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American Economic Review: Insights American Economic Association

Loading next page...
 
/lp/american-economic-association/monopsony-in-online-labor-markets-HOukFxxFMm

References (63)

Publisher
American Economic Association
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 © American Economic Association
ISSN
2640-205X
eISSN
2640-2068
DOI
10.1257/aeri.20180150
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractDespite the seemingly low switching and search costs of on-demand labor markets like Amazon Mechanical Turk, we find substantial monopsony power, as measured by the elasticity of labor supply facing the requester (employer). We isolate plausibly exogenous variation in rewards using a double machine learning estimator applied to a large dataset of scraped MTurk tasks. We also reanalyze data from five MTurk experiments that randomized payments to obtain corresponding experimental estimates. Both approaches yield uniformly low labor supply elasticities, around 0.1, with little heterogeneity. Our results suggest monopsony might also be present even in putatively “thick” labor markets. (JEL C44, J22, J23, J42)

Journal

American Economic Review: InsightsAmerican Economic Association

Published: Mar 1, 2020

There are no references for this article.