By choosing to use Amazon IDs as worker identifiers, Mechanical Turk gets all of the disadvantages of having anonymous strangers do jobs on the web -- lack of accountability, diminished incentives, malicious workers -- but none of the advantages of protecting workers, since at the end of the day, they're not actually anonymous anyway.
This is a non-issue in MobileWorks (and for that matter, oDesk and Freelancer as well). In these systems, everyone's explicitly working under a real name, which improves incentives to perform well, and makes it a whole lot easier to get good results through trust and honesty.
Well said and 100% agree. I pressed them on that a few times and never got a good answer as to why they think anonymity is a good design choice. Many others I have spoken to who've used mturk significantly have come to the same conclusion you did.
Well, I know this is not the typical use case, but the need I had for it was to perform some experiments on the quality of recommender systems suggestions.
In this case, as the experiments involved people and the intend was to publish the results, the "workers" had to be anonymous.
By choosing to use Amazon IDs as worker identifiers, Mechanical Turk gets all of the disadvantages of having anonymous strangers do jobs on the web -- lack of accountability, diminished incentives, malicious workers -- but none of the advantages of protecting workers, since at the end of the day, they're not actually anonymous anyway.
This is a non-issue in MobileWorks (and for that matter, oDesk and Freelancer as well). In these systems, everyone's explicitly working under a real name, which improves incentives to perform well, and makes it a whole lot easier to get good results through trust and honesty.