Last week, Newsweek published an article titled 
I recall a highly talked about presentation (although highly unconventional) by M. Six Silberman whereby he discussed the "Sellers' problems in human computation markets". The basic question: can we protect the workers there from exploitation and from sweatshop salaries? Luis von Ahn posted a similar post on his blog. In the comments of the blog post, someone suggested that the low wages on Mechanical Turk is simply the result of high supply of workers and low demand for their work however I argue that what Amazon Mechanical Turk is today is a market for lemons, following the terminology of Akerlof's famous paper, for which he got the 2001 Nobel prize.
I have been doing research on the economic impact of product reviews for a while. One thing that we have noticed is that the quality of the reviews can have an impact on product sales, independently of the polarity of the review. A review that is well-written tends to inspire confidence about the product, even if the review is negative. Typically such reviews are perceived as objective and thorough. So, if we have a high-quality, but negative, review this may serve as a guarantee that the negative aspects of the product are not that bad after all.
