Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers Can Provide Consistent and Economically Meaningful Data

We explore the consistency of the characteristics of individuals who participate in studies posted on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). The primary individuals analyzed in this study are subjects who participated in at least two of eleven experiments that were run on AMT between September of 2012 to January of 2018. We demonstrate subjects consistently report a series of demographic and personality characteristics. Further, subjective willingness to take risk is found to be significantly correlated with decisions made in a simple lottery experiment with real stakes - even when the subjective risk measure is reported months, sometimes years, in the past. This suggests the quality of data obtained via AMT is not significantly harmed by the lack of control over the conditions under which the responses are recorded.