The Role of Religion in Online Pro-social Lending : An Interactional View

Biases in online platforms pose a threat to social inclusion. We examine the influence of a novel source of bias in online philanthropic lending, namely that associated with religious differences. We first propose a measure of religion distance between pairs of countries, which we incorporate into a gravity model of trade, to explain variation in country-to-country lending volumes. We then propose a set of contextual moderators that characterize a lender and borrower's local social context, which we argue have the potential to moderate the influence of religion distance on lending decisions. We empirically estimate our gravity model using lending activity data from Kiva.org between 2006 and 2017. We demonstrate the negative and significant effect of religion distance on lending activity, over and above other established factors in the literature, and we demonstrate the moderating role of individuals' sociopolitical environment. Our findings speak to the important frictions associated with religious differences in individual philanthropy, and they point to the role of government policy vis-à-vis religious tolerance as a determinant of citizens' global philanthropic behavior