Monitoring Policies and Gig Workers’ Job Preferences

Monitoring, a digital surveillance technology that allows employers to track the activities of workers, is ubiquitous in the gig economy where workforce is distributed. However, workers are often reluctant to be monitored due to privacy concerns, resulting in a hidden economic cost for employers as workers tend to demand higher wages for monitored jobs. To help employers make informed decisions about whether to adopt monitoring and what monitoring policy to use, we investigate how three common aspects of monitoring affect workers’ willingness to accept monitored jobs, as well as the underlying mechanisms, through online experiments on two gig economy platforms (Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific). The three aspects of monitoring are intensity (how much information is collected), transparency (whether the monitoring policy is disclosed to workers), and control (whether workers can remove sensitive information). We find that, as the monitoring intensity increases, workers become less likely to accept monitoring due to elevated privacy concerns. Furthermore, we find that being transparent about the monitoring policy increases workers’ willingness to accept monitoring only when the monitoring intensity is low, as transparent disclosure does not reduce privacy concerns over high-intensity monitoring. Interestingly, providing control over high-intensity monitoring does not significantly reduce workers’ privacy concerns either, rendering this well-intentioned policy ineffective. Finally, females are more willing to accept monitored jobs than males as they perceive higher payment protection from monitoring and have lower privacy concerns. On average, we estimate that the compensations required for workers to accept monitoring are $1.8/hr for AMT workers and $1.6/hr for Prolific workers, which translate to roughly 37.3% and 28.5% of their average hourly wages, respectively.