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A Deep Causal Inference Approach to Measuring the Effects of Forming Group Loans in Online Non-profit Microfinance Platform

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  • Thai T. Pham
  • Yuanyuan Shen

Abstract

Kiva is an online non-profit crowdsouring microfinance platform that raises funds for the poor in the third world. The borrowers on Kiva are small business owners and individuals in urgent need of money. To raise funds as fast as possible, they have the option to form groups and post loan requests in the name of their groups. While it is generally believed that group loans pose less risk for investors than individual loans do, we study whether this is the case in a philanthropic online marketplace. In particular, we measure the effect of group loans on funding time while controlling for the loan sizes and other factors. Because loan descriptions (in the form of texts) play an important role in lenders' decision process on Kiva, we make use of this information through deep learning in natural language processing. In this aspect, this is the first paper that uses one of the most advanced deep learning techniques to deal with unstructured data in a way that can take advantage of its superior prediction power to answer causal questions. We find that on average, forming group loans speeds up the funding time by about 3.3 days.

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  • Thai T. Pham & Yuanyuan Shen, 2017. "A Deep Causal Inference Approach to Measuring the Effects of Forming Group Loans in Online Non-profit Microfinance Platform," Papers 1706.02795, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1706.02795
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    Cited by:

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    2. Brett R. Gordon & Florian Zettelmeyer & Neha Bhargava & Dan Chapsky, 2019. "A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement: Evidence from Big Field Experiments at Facebook," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 38(2), pages 193-225, March.
    3. Soumajyoti Sarkar & Hamidreza Alvari, 2020. "Mitigating Bias in Online Microfinance Platforms: A Case Study on Kiva.org," Papers 2006.12995, arXiv.org.

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