The Effects of Pay-to-Quit Incentives on Crowdworker Task Quality

Companies such as Zappos.com and Amazon.com provide financial incentives for newer employees to quit. The premise is that workers who will accept this offer are misaligned with their company culture, which will therefore negatively affect quality over time. Could this pay-to-quit incentive scheme align workers in online labor markets? We conduct five empirical experiments evaluating different pay-to-quit incentives with crowdworkers and evaluate their effects on mean task accuracy, retention rate, and improvement in mean task accuracy. We find that the number of times a user is prompted for the inducement, the type and frequency of performance feedback given to participants, the type of incentive, as well as the amount offered can help retain high-performing workers but encourage poor-performing workers to quit early. When we combine the best features from our experiments and examine their aggregate effectiveness, mean task accuracy is improved by 28.3%. Last, we also find that certain demographics contribute to the effectiveness of pay-to-quit incentives.