TurkServer: Enabling Synchronous and Longitudinal Online Experiments
Andrew Mao, David Parkes, Yiling Chen, Ariel D. Procaccia, Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Haoqi Zhang · 2012
With the proliferation of online labor markets and other human computation platforms, online experiments have become a low-cost and scalable way to empirically test hypotheses and mechanisms in both human computation and social science. Yet, despite the potential in designing more powerful and expressive online experiments using multiple subjects, researchers still face many technical and logistical difficulties. We see synchronous and longitudinal experiments involving real-time interaction between participants as a dualuse paradigm for both human computation and social science, and present TurkServer, a platform that facilitates these types of experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our work has the potential to make more fruitful online experiments accessible to researchers in many different fields.