Hey folks,
This month we're holding a special edition of the Research and Data showcase
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Research_and_Data/Showcase>.
We've invited Dr. Yan Chen, Professor from the UMuch iSchool to present her
work studying community dynamics with Kiva (micro-lending platform) and
what her results might imply for Wikimedia's sites. To take advantage of
her travel schedule, we'll be holding the event on *Friday** November 14
at 11.30 PST (UTC-8) *rather than the usually 3rd Wednesday. The event
will be live streamed and recorded as usual. You can join the conversation
via IRC on
freenode.net in the the #wikimedia-research channel.
We look forward to seeing you there,
-Aaron
*Does Team Competition Increase Pro-Social Lending? Evidence from Online
Microfinance.*By Yan Chen <http://yanchen.people.si.umich.edu/>In the first
half of the talk, I will present our empirical analysis of the effects of
team competition on pro-social lending activity on
Kiva.org, the first
microlending website to match lenders with entrepreneurs in developing
countries. Using naturally occurring field data, we find that lenders who
join teams contribute 1.2 more loans per month than those who do not.
Furthermore, teams differ in activity levels. To investigate this
heterogeneity, we run a field experiment by posting forum messages.
Compared to the control, we find that lenders from inactive teams make
significantly more loans when exposed to a goal-setting message and that
team coordination increases the magnitude of this effect.In the second part
of the talk, I will discuss a randomized field experiment we did in May
2014, when we recommend teams to lenders on Kiva. We find that lenders are
more likely to join teams in their local area. However, after joining
teams, those who join popular teams (on the leaderboard) are more active in
lending.