Ghita RS. Do mturkers collude in interactive online experiments?
Behav Res Methods 2024;
56:4823-4835. [PMID:
37658256 PMCID:
PMC11289075 DOI:
10.3758/s13428-023-02220-3]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 08/08/2023] [Indexed: 09/03/2023]
Abstract
One of the issues that can potentially affect the internal validity of interactive online experiments that recruit participants using crowdsourcing platforms is collusion: participants could act upon information shared through channels that are external to the experimental design. Using two experiments, I measure how prevalent collusion is among MTurk workers and whether collusion depends on experimental design choices. Despite having incentives to collude, I find no evidence that MTurk workers collude in the treatments that resembled the design of most other interactive online experiments. This suggests collusion is not a concern for data quality in typical interactive online experiments that recruit participants using crowdsourcing platforms. However, I find that approximately 3% of MTurk workers collude when the payoff of collusion is unusually high. Therefore, collusion should not be overlooked as a possible danger to data validity in interactive experiments that recruit participants using crowdsourcing platforms when participants have strong incentives to engage in such behavior.
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