Crowds, Lending, Machine, and Bias
研究利用众贷平台数据，发现机器学习构建的投资组合在风险控制和收益上优于人群，且能降低借款人利率，但存在性别偏见；提出的去偏方法虽降低预测精度，仍能改善人群投资决策。
Can machines outperform crowds in financial lending decisions? Using data from a crowd-lending platform, we show that, compared with portfolios created by crowds, a reasonably sophisticated machine can construct financial portfolios that provide better returns while controlling for risk. Further, we find that the machine-created portfolios benefit not only the lenders, but also the borrowers. Borrowers receive loans at a much lower interest rate as the machine can weed out the riskiest loans better than the crowds. We also find suggestive evidence of algorithmic bias in machine decisions. We find that, compared with women, men are more likely to receive loans by machine. We propose a general and effective “debiasing” method that can be applied to any prediction-focused machine learning (ML) applications. We show that the debiased ML algorithm, which suffers from lower prediction accuracy, still improves the crowd’s investment decisions in our context. Our results indicate that ML can help crowd-lending platforms better fulfill the promise of providing access to financial resources to otherwise underserved individuals and ensure fairness in the allocation of these resources.