The Role of Religion in Online Prosocial Lending

The Internet has long been argued to have “flattened” the world. A variety of work, however, has shown that cross-border frictions continue to manifest through various individual level differences, e.g., cultural, demographic, and geographic. We extend this literature here, offering a novel consideration of religious differences as a significant barrier to online peer-to-peer transactions in the context of prosocial lending. Specifically, we propose a measure of religious distance between any given pair of countries. We then incorporate this measure into a standard gravity model of trade, which we use to explain country-to-country lending volumes between 2006 and 2017 at kiva.org. We demonstrate the negative and significant effects of religious differences on lending activity over and above other established factors. Moreover, we demonstrate that the effects of religious differences vary a great deal, being moderated by the social environment characterizing both a lender country and borrower country in a given time period. That is, we show that increases in the degree of social hostilities within a lender country amplifies the baseline (negative) effects of religious differences on lending activity. At the same time, we demonstrate that diversity of religion and greater physical distances attenuate the role of religious differences

Feminist theory, Gender and Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding promotes financial democracy through advancement in ICT for minorities in finance. While crowdfunding has reduced the underrepresentation of females in entrepreneurial finance, little attention has been paid to the influence of context on the discussion on gender in entrepreneurial finance. We examine this by applying feminist theory. By this, we argue that the gender effects of certain factors that have been generally associated with one gender may vary with place. From Finland, a gender equal context, we analyse survey data from 556 contributors of the largest reward crowdfunding platform. The findings show that certain factors that prior studies have shown to be associated with female contributors are more significantly associated with males in the study’s context. The findings support the argument that male contributors in an effort to change their ‘historical dominance’ to gain traction and legitimacy within an ‘equal society’ may have to be socially and morally sensitive

Does Exposure to Shared Solutions Lead to Better Outcomes? An Empirical Investigation in Online Crowdsourcing Contests

Crowdsourcing contests provide an effective way to elicit novel ideas and creative solutions from collective intelligence. A key design feature of crowdsourcing contests is the competition between contest participants to complete a specific task with financial awards to the winner(s). In recent years, some crowdsourcing contest platforms provide options to contest participants for solution sharing during the competition. This study intends to evaluate the influence of exposure to shared solutions on different stakeholders, including the team, and the requester. Our study employs a multiple-level panel data from a large online crowdsourcing platform, Kaggle.com, to examine these effects. For teams, exposure to shared solutions helps new entrant teams to jump-start and help teams to achieve better performance in the subsequent submissions, and the teams’ skill level negatively moderates these positive effects. For requesters, allowing solution sharing has both benefits and costs in terms of improving the best performance of the crowd. We highlight the theoretical implications of the study and provide practical suggestions for crowdsourcing contest platforms to help them decide whether to allow solution sharing during the competition