mturkotreeutils 0.0.3

set of utilities for oTree and mTurk

Installation:

1. Either:

• type pip install mturkotreeutils in your terminal window.

2. or:

• clone exisiting project git clone https://github.com/chapkovski/custom-waiting-page-for-mturk and copy the otree_mturk_utils folder into your project folder, next to the apps of your module.

3. After that add “otree_mturk_utils” to your INSTALLED_APPS section of settings.py file like this:

   INSTALLED_APPS = [
       'otree',
       'otree_mturk_utils',
   ]

4. In the views.py file of your project, import the pages:

   from otree_mturk_utils.views import CustomMturkPage, CustomMturkWaitPage

How to use it:

To use the custom waiting page, just inherit your WaitPage not from the ‘standard’ oTree WaitPage, but from CustomMturkWaitPage:

from otree_mturk_utils.views import CustomMturkPage, CustomMturkWaitPage

class MyWaitPage(CustomMturkWaitPage):
     ...

the CustomMturkWaitPage has in addition to standard properties of oTree WaitPage (such as wait_for_all_groups or group_by_arrival_time), four additional properties (see details in the section below):

1. pay_by_task: compensation (in points or dollars) for each task correctly submitted at the waiting page. Default value: 0.

2. pay_by_time: compensation (in points or dollars) for each minute of waiting at the waiting page. Default value: 0.

3. startwp_timer: How fast the participant can quit the study (in seconds). Default value: Never.

4. task: What kind of activity a person can do while waiting. Right now there are two options: filling in a ‘Big Five’ questionnaire and a real effort task (finding sum of two maximum numbers). In the future we will add games as an option (tic tac toe, snake, hangman etc.) . Possible values now: ['survey', 'real_effort']. Default value: real_effort .

5. use_task: whether the participant will see any kind of tasks while waiting. Default value: True.

What does the default custom wait page do?

The custom wait page was created to allow participants to wait for a group to form, to ensure that they remain available and ready to start the experiment while they wait, and to let them finish the experiment if the waiting lasts for too long.

The experimenter can require the participant to do an activity while he waits, by setting an attribute of the page (here use_real_effort_task = True , to have a real effort task). The main goal of this activity is to have the participant stay focused on the experiment while he waits. But be careful, as soon as a group is formed, the members of the group will be forwarded to the next page, even if they are in the middle of a page. This could create frustration if not anticipated, so you should warn the participants in the instructions. (If the task is to answer a survey, they will be offered to complete the survey at the end of the experiment, their previous answers will be saved.)

You can decide to pay the participant based on his wait time and on his “score” in the effort task by setting the attributes pay_by_task and pay_by_time in your waitpage (by default, this is 0). At the end of the experiment, you will find this additional payment in participants.vars[‘payment_for_wait’]

The experimenter can also set a limit of time after which a player is offered to complete the study if he wants (by specifying the attribute “time_before_exit_offer”, labelled in minutes, which is by default equal to 2 hours). This is hidden if more than 30 minutes. By clicking on “finish the study”, the participant will skip all the CustomMturkPage and CustomMturkWaitPage pages in the remaining app sequence (if you want him to complete a survey in a final app, just do not inherit the survey pages from CustomMturkPage).

Maybe in a later version, we will offer the option to skip only the current round or the current app, and not necessarily all the remaining CustomMturkPage and CustomMturkWaitPage of the session. Also we might offer a feature detecting if the remaining participants are not enough for creating a new group, to signal the waiting participants that it is not necessary to wait.