elicit the willingness to pay for social insurance.<sup>4</sup> The approach follows Eriksson and Kristensen (2014), who studied the trade-off between wages and alternate employment benefits among Danish workers. In their set-up, employment benefits included internet and a home computer, work-related training, health insurance, work-time flexibility, and an annual bonus. Out of all of the different employment benefits, they found that work-time flexibility was most highly valued, followed by health insurance (Eriksson and Kristensen 2014). Wiswall and Zafar (2018) employ a discrete choice experiment to estimate preference for work flexibility, job stability, and earnings among high-performing undergraduates at the New York University for hypothetical future jobs. Other studies that have employed a discrete choice experiment include Mas and Pallais (2017), who analyzed the willingness to pay for different work arrangements – with their main focus being flexibility – as part of a hiring process for a national call center in the US, thus allowing them to replicate a real market transaction. When comparing their findings through the hiring process and a vignette-based survey experiment that they conducted to test for validity, their results were broadly consistent. In turn, this suggests that vignette-based experiments, when designed properly, can generate responses that are similar to market choices (Mas and Pallais 2017).

# **3 Data**

Our sample consists of 1,038 gig workers, including digital freelancers and location-based workers. The data was collected through an online survey administered by the Malaysian arm of a global market research firm, Ipsos. To gather respondents, we partnered with the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) to tap into their network of digital freelancers via their Global Online Work Force (GLOW)<sup>5</sup> members, as well as an online panel respondents of gig workers. The data collection period is February 2022 – May 2022.

The online survey questionnaire is divided into four parts: (i) respondents’ demographic background, which asks details on age, gender, schooling and marital status; (ii) employment characteristics, which asks details on respondents’ current employment such as their status in employment, occupation, duration of employment, weekly pay, social security coverage, and other occupations if they are working more than one job; (iii) an experimental section on choosing between two hypothetical jobs; and lastly (iv) preferred work characteristics, which asks respondents’ preferences on different aspects of work characteristics using a 5-point Likert scale from “Very Important” to “Not important”. Some examples of work characteristics include earning good money, the ability to work in international settings/teams, insurance coverage for workplace injuries and pension income upon retirement.

# **4 Methodology**

## **a. Research Question**

This paper focuses on three inter-linked research questions:

> 4 The contingent valuation method directly asks people for valuations of different attributes, while in discrete choice experiments, people are given the choice of two or more scenarios, in which attributes and prices/values are randomly varied, and are asked to choose their preferred option. Mas and Pallais (2017) discuss some of the different considerations with regard to the two methods.

> 5 GLOW is a training program offered by MDEC for individuals interested in becoming a digital freelancer. During the peak of COVID-19, MDEC created a new program called GLOW _Penjana_ , a highly targeted program to help individuals whose livelihoods were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and movement restrictions.

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