Personality traits and performance in online labour markets.

EMPLOYEE psychology; PERSONALITY; WORK experience (Employment); EXPERIMENTAL design; ELECTRONIC commerce; RESEARCH methodology; TASK performance; SEX distribution; INTERPERSONAL relations; CONSCIENCE; DESCRIPTIVE statistics; CROWDSOURCING; COGNITIVE testing; JOB performance; LABOR market; SOCIODEMOGRAPHIC factors

We investigate the impact of non-cognitive skills on the quality of task-specific outcomes by conducting a quasi-experiment on a well-known online crowdsourcing platform. We show that worker's performance varies with personality traits, gender, human capital, crowdsourcing experience and work effort. Regarding the effects of non-cognitive skills, we find that worker's performance in online microtasks is positively related to extraversion and agreeableness. The positive impact of extroverts is also revealed when performance is adjusted for task completion time. These findings provide implications regarding the integration of selection mechanisms in online labour matching platforms aiming in uncovering micro-workers' soft skills to improve performance and consequently the allocation of resources in online microtasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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