Pay to Think: Incentive Design Is the Hidden Variable in Human–AI Research
Opening — Why this matters now Human–AI decision-making research is quietly facing a credibility problem — and it has little to do with model accuracy, explainability, or alignment. It has everything to do with incentives. As AI systems increasingly assist (or override) human judgment in domains like law, medicine, finance, and content moderation, researchers rely on empirical studies to understand how humans interact with AI advice. These studies, in turn, rely heavily on crowd workers playing the role of decision-makers. Yet one foundational design choice is often treated as an afterthought: how participants are paid. ...