"As some of you may know, on July 22nd Amazon effectively quadrupled its fees for high-volume requesters. Before that day, Amazon charged 10% of whatever we paid to workers, but now it takes a full 40% of what is paid to workers. While the reasons for this price increase are unclear, its effects are crystal clear: because we are in a time of limited research funding, this will lead to a reduction in either 1) the number of HITs created by academics, 2) the level of pay workers receive, or 3) both of these things. In order to continue running these short studies on MTurk at all, Amazon has forced me to reduce the pay associated with them by a few cents (and I'm still paying significantly more overall than I used to!). If you can, please take a moment to tell Amazon to roll back its fee increase, or at least introduce an academic discount for researchers, since that would only mean more HITs and more money per HIT for the valuable work you do. Thanks!"
I submitted this as feedback. I'm probably going to be banned from mTurk... If that happens, I did it for all of us!
Please consider not making such a drastic increase of payment for requesters. This will have a negative, if not detrimental, impact for both requesters and users.
Most academic studies have very limited funds to begin with and they try to compensate workers fairly for participating in these studies. As a former research assistant for a university that is ranked nationally for their medical endeavors and success in state of the art medical care, I know all too well that it can be very difficult to find research subjects locally that fit the inclusion/exclusion criteria for a study.
By increasing fees for the requesters, that is effectively going to make many studies to not be conducted, as the mTurk workers will not be adequately compensated for their participation. The data that researchers receive from mTurk workers is invaluable.
Please take into account the amount of research that might not take place after imposing such a steep percentage of pay on requesters.
Thank you for your consideration.