The Validity of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in Assessing Risk Preferences - A Research Note

21 Pages Posted: 6 Jan 2024

See all articles by Martin Altenburger

Martin Altenburger

University of Vienna - Faculty of Business, Economics, and Statistics

Christian Schmid

University of Vienna - Faculty of Business, Economics, and Statistics

Date Written: December 11, 2023

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the validity of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) for assessing risk preferences via the widely-used lottery-choice task of Holt and Laury (2002). More specifically, we study the share of participants who show a consistent answer-pattern and, thus, consistent risk preferences. Our results show that in a sample of 1202 participants on MTurk, only 43 percent managed to answer the task consistently. By comparing this percentage with accounting studies which use this task in the laboratory, we observe that the share of consistent answers is considerably lower when using MTurk. Our results also reveal that participants who answered inconsistently spent less time on the task and showed different risk preference values. Furthermore, several demographic variables seem to influence the likelihood of answering consistently. Our findings indicate that researchers should be careful when considering MTurk as a platform to recruit participants and should expect to need larger samples.

Keywords: Risk Preferences, MTurk, Risk Aversion, Consistency, Validity, Data Quality

Suggested Citation

Altenburger, Martin and Schmid, Christian, The Validity of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in Assessing Risk Preferences - A Research Note (December 11, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4660601 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4660601

Martin Altenburger (Contact Author)

University of Vienna - Faculty of Business, Economics, and Statistics ( email )

Vienna, A-1210
Austria

Christian Schmid

University of Vienna - Faculty of Business, Economics, and Statistics ( email )

Vienna, A-1090
Austria

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