With the ubiquity of mobile devices and an increasing trend in extending real-world activities into the virtual, goal-directed platforms have experienced rising popularity as they provide individuals with enhanced capabilities for goal pursuit. Prior literature has demonstrated the important...

The Internet has long been argued to have “flattened” the world. However, a variety of work has shown that frictions do remain, deriving from biases and preferences tied to individual-level differences, e.g., cultural, demographic, and geographic. Such biases, if present, are undesirable...

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...