The hourly rate is the only honest number

Two studies sit on a dashboard. One pays $5.00, the other $2.00. Almost everybody picks the first one, and on most panels almost everybody is wrong.

	Study A	Study B
Reward	$5.00	$2.00
Stated length	35 minutes	8 minutes
Actual median length	44 minutes	9 minutes
Effective hourly	$6.82	$13.33

Study B pays nearly twice as well. Nothing on a per-survey display shows that, and the display is what people decide from.

Why panels show the price and not the rate

Because the price is the flattering number. A long, tedious questionnaire with a high absolute reward looks generous per unit and reads badly per hour. Showing the hourly rate would put the panel's worst inventory at the bottom of its own list, which is exactly what the number is for, and exactly why it is rarely shown.

There is a second reason, less cynical: the hourly rate requires knowing the real median length rather than the buyer's estimate. Buyers systematically underestimate their own questionnaires — not dishonestly, but because they have never taken one cold, without knowing what the next screen holds. A panel that displays an hourly rate computed from a buyer's stated length is publishing a number it has not checked.

What per-survey framing does to the data

The effect is not on morale, it is on behaviour, and it shows up in the dataset.

A participant who has learned that stated lengths are unreliable develops a defence: start everything, abandon anything that turns out long. Abandonment rates climb. The people who do finish the long ones are disproportionately those who are not tracking their own time carefully, which is not a sample characteristic anyone wanted.

A second defence is worse. If the reward is fixed regardless of effort and the length turns out to be double what was stated, the rational move is to finish fast. Grids get straight-lined. Open-ends shrink to three words. Every one of those is a quality flag, and the panel's quality team spends its week removing responses that its own pricing display produced.

Most of what gets classified as inattention is a rational response to being paid by the task and charged by the hour.

How the number is computed here

Every study on a member's dashboard shows what it pays, how long it should take, and what that works out to per hour. The third figure is derived, not entered:

• Reward in cents, multiplied by sixty, divided by the length in minutes.
• Length comes from the median of completed sessions once there are enough of them. Before that it is the buyer's estimate, and it is labelled as an estimate.
• When the observed median exceeds the stated length by a wide margin, the study is flagged for review rather than silently re-displayed. A questionnaire running at double its brief is usually a routing fault, and it will keep mis-paying people until somebody looks at it.

Sorting by hourly rate rather than by reward is the default. That decision costs us: the expensive, tedious studies are the ones buyers pay most for, and putting them at the bottom of the list is not a commercially comfortable choice. It is the correct one, because the alternative is building a panel out of people who have not yet worked out what they are being paid.

What this does not fix

An hourly rate is still an average across a study, and averages hide variance. Somebody who reads carefully takes longer than the median and therefore earns less per hour than the number says. That is a real limitation and we do not have a good answer to it — a per-person rate would be computed after the fact and could not be shown at the point of decision, which is the only moment it would be useful.

It also does not fix screen-outs, which is a separate arithmetic and a separate piece of writing. A high hourly rate on a study that turns away seven people in eight is not the deal it appears to be unless the screen-out is paid.