Analysis of eCrime in Crowd-sourced Labor Markets: Mechanical Turk vs. Freelancer

Research in the economics of security has contributed more than a decade of empirical findings to the understanding of the microeconomics of (in)security, privacy, and ecrime. Here we build on insights from previous macro-level research on crime, and microeconomic analyses of ecrime to develop a set of hypotheses to predict which variables are correlated with national participation levels in crowd-sourced ecrime. Some hypotheses appear to hold, e.g. Internet penetration, English literacy, size of the labor market, and government policy all are significant indicators of crowd-sourced ecrime market participation. Greater governmental transparency, less corruption, and more consistent rule of law lower the participation rate in ecrime. Other results are counter-intuitive. GDP per person is not significant, and unusually for crime, a greater percentage of women does not correlate to decreased crime. One finding relevant to policymaking is that deterring bidders in crowd-sourced labor markets is an ineffective approach to decreasing demand and in turn market size.