Ethical Issues in Corpus Linguistics And Annotation: Pay Per Hit Does Not Affect Effective Hourly Rate For Linguistic Resource Development On Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Ethical issues reported with paid crowdsourcing include unfairly low wages. It is assumed that such issues are under the control of the task requester. Can one control the amount that a worker earns by controlling the amount that one pays? 412 linguistic data development tasks were submitted to Amazon Mechanical Turk. The pay per HIT was manipulated through a range of values. We examined the relationship between the pay that is offered per HIT and the effective pay rate. There is no such relationship. Paying more per HIT does not cause workers to earn more: the higher the pay per HIT, the more time workers spend on them ( = 0.92). So, the effective hourly rate stays roughly the same. The finding has clear implications for language resource builders who want to behave ethically: other means must be found in order to compensate workers fairly.