Department of Theoretical Economics research seminar with Anastasiia Khazhgerieva, HSE

Dear colleagues,  

Department of Theoretical Economics invites you to attend the research seminar with Ph.D student Anastasiia Khazhgerieva, HSE

Date: May 21, 2024
Time: 1:00 p.m.
Working language: English

The link to the seminar:https://telemost.yandex.ru/j/64729593999529

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Title: "Learning Task Complexity: Role of Experience in a Crowdsourcing Platform"

 

Abstract: In a crowdsourcing platform, labor supply and demand decisions happen at a significantly higher frequency than in a traditional labor market. As a result, a worker faces uncertainty associated with a labor supply decision every time when considering entering a previously unknown crowd project. Using detailed micro-level big data, we study the distinctive features of labor interactions in a micro-tasking platform with a focus on the role of worker experience affecting worker-employer matches. First, we show that in the absence of full information about tasks’ complexity, workers form their expectations based on available indicative task characteristics initially unrelated to the cost of effort. Worker experience is proven to alleviate ambiguity and contribute to the exponential growth of attractive tasks.
Second, the pure cost of uncertainty resulting from the absence of some project characteristics for just-created projects accounts for a 3.66¢ loss for a worker, which is twice as large as an average microtask reward. Third, labor supply elasticity significantly differs across content categories of micro-tasks suggesting a taste for the specialization of crowdsourcing workers.