title: Recommending teams promotes prosocial lending in online microfinance.
abstract: This paper reports the results of a large-scale field experiment designed to test the hypothesis that group membership can increase participation and prosocial lending for an online crowdlending community, Kiva. The experiment uses variations on a simple email manipulation to encourage Kiva members to join a lending team, testing which types of team recommendation emails are most likely to get members to join teams as well as the subsequent impact on lending. We find that emails do increase the likelihood that a lender joins a team, and that joining a team increases lending in a short window (1 wk) following our intervention. The impact on lending is large relative to median lender lifetime loans. We also find that lenders are more likely to join teams recommended based on location similarity rather than team status. Our results suggest team recommendation can be an effective behavioral mechanism to increase prosocial lending.
authors.affiliation: School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Ai
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117570.
authors.forename: Roy
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109; yanchen@umich.edu.|Department of Economics, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
authors.forename: Yan
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-1287-4525
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.
authors.forename: Qiaozhu
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Mei
authors.affiliation: Kidaptive, Mountain View, CA 94043.
authors.forename: Webb
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Phillips
keywords: charitable giving; field experiment; microfinance; recommender systems; social identity