The Challenges and Future of Digital Work

Podcasts@SMU

Assistant Professor Kotaro Hara Crowd work or crowdsourcing, an emerging form of online contracting work, is growing. About 600,000 workers participate in the online gig economy annually and the number is growing rapidly. Crowdsourcing facilitates new ways of working. Its remote and asynchronous work style – unbounded by time and location – could enable people with disabilities and stay-at-home parents to work. On the other hand, many are concerned that workers in crowdsourcing markets are treated unfairly. Researchers are particularly concerned about low wage of crowd work. For example, past research has found that workers typically earn US$2 an hour. In this podcast, Assistant Professor Kotaro Hara from SMU School of Information Systems discusses his research on why crowdsourcing platforms for work, which includes Amazon Mechanical Turk, contribute to low wages for workers in the gig economy, and what could potentially be done to improve the efficacy of these platforms.