The Work/Leisure Trade-off in Online Labour Markets: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk

Abstract

This article illustrates the trade-off between online work and leisure. We use the introduction of the widely played mobile game Pokémon Go to observe its impact on the online labour platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk. To measure whether a mobile game, for which players must physically go outside, affects the proportion of American workers on the platform, we create an index to measure the intensity of Pokémon Go use. This article highlights that American online workers, for whom Amazon Mechanical Turk is a secondary source of revenue, are susceptible to exploit the work-leisure trade-off on a daily basis. We have two main findings. First, we show that a one s.d. increase in the relative use of Pokémon Go leads to a daily decrease in the proportion of American workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk of 4.38 percentage points, corresponding to a decrease of up to 1,095 workers. Second, we find that an increase in the search for part-time jobs raises the proportion of American workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Keywords: Online labour market, Pokémon Go, Media impact

JEL Classification: L82, J49, J82