I saw and experienced first-hand the motivational effect of Kiva teams. I can see a lot of
positives for Wikipedia: increased contributions given competition (if the leader board
is constructed in a way not to demotivate the lower performing teams) and perhaps the more
experienced editors will help the newer editors (or at least give them "air
cover")
Sent from my iPad
On 14 Nov 2014, at 2:51 am, Aaron Halfaker
<ahalfaker(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hey folks,
This month we're holding a special edition of the 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
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.
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