Every once in a while, I get an e-mail from a MTurk worker who says they experienced a technical glitch with my HIT and they couldn’t submit it successfully. I can usually tell it’s not a scam because they mention things from the HIT itself. (At a purely rational level, it’s probably not worth their time to write long e-mails about a missing $0.59 HIT reward, but such things can become emotional for some workers.)
I don’t begrudge the worker the $0.59 or whatever the reward was for the HIT. I’d be happy to give them a MTurk “bonus” in that amount. The problem is that Amazon does not allow a requester to give a bonus unless the worker has already successfully completed a HIT for that requester. This is a hobble that Amazon has purposefully put into the system. (I really can’t imagine what nefarious activity this hobble might prevent.) If the worker has not completed my HIT, and if they’ve never completed one of my HITs in the past, I’m prevented from giving them a make-good bonus.
As a workaround for this problem, when I get an e-mail asking for a make-good payment, I ask the worker to visit this website (screenshot). It instructs the worker to do a simple no-reward HIT (screenshot) that I keep running all the time on MTurk. After I approve their submission to the simple HIT, I have worked around Amazon’s hobble and I can give the worker a bonus in the correct amount. This process also gives me some intelligence about the errors that occasionally occur. (I haven’t seen consistency, so maybe the cause really is sun spots.) I go into this HIT every month or so and process any bonuses. It works very well, and I’ve had positive feedback from workers who were relieved they wouldn’t get “ripped off” after they experienced a glitch.
– Eric DeRosia