Microfinance Decision Making: A Field Study of Prosocial Lending
通过研究Kiva平台上的借贷数据，发现贷款人偏好个体借款人而非团体，且倾向于选择与自己社会距离更近的借款人，揭示了亲社会借贷中的可识别受害者效应和社会相似性偏好。
Microfinancing, or small uncollateralized loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world, has recently emerged as a leading contender to cure world poverty. Our research investigates the characteristics of borrowers that engender lending through Kiva, a popular organization that connects individual lenders to borrowers through online microfinance. Lenders favor individual borrowers over groups or consortia of borrowers, a pattern consistent with the identifiable victim effect. They also favor borrowers that are socially proximate to themselves. Across three dimensions of social distance (gender, occupation, and first name initial), lenders prefer to give to those who are more like themselves.