@Janthir ,
@Squatty
Here is why we are thinking of what we proposed (reframed in a better way). We believe the HITs can be completed in 15 minutes or less. However, initially people tend to take a lot more time getting used to the framework. And it can take them up to 25-30 minutes. So we saw workers post on the forums that the HITs are taking a lot more time than what was mentioned and are paying less. Since, we are from academia and we were hoping to get the data from MTurk within certain time constraints, the best thing was to look at completion times and estimate a new (fair) price and we did that. However, then we saw that the completion times went down, so we were in fact over paying (as far as the amount of time spent was on an average). So, we launched just a small set of HITs as a pilot. However, we are going beyond our budget if we continue at the same rate. And, so we decided to be fair we should pay initially higher amounts and then reduce it to lower amounts (which are the actual rates per the time that should be needed).
However, Iwe think that the better strategy now would be to just continue with a fixed amount and hope that workers will continue to perform more HITs and reach the expected time. We can motivate them by sending bonuses initially rather than having higher priced HITs.