Effects of team membership on pro-social lending in online microfinance: Large-scale field experiments on Kiva

This will be a presentation of two large-scale field experiments designed to test the hypothesis that group membership can increase participation and pro-social lending for an online crowdlending community, Kiva. The first 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.

• Economics and finance
• behavioral psychology
• Financial Technology