Scott E. Hartley

Today, I’ve released a working paper entitled “Kiva.org: Crowd-Sourced Microfinance and Cooperation in Group Lending,” based on original research conducted in the Cooperation Group at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.  The paper observes 120 Kiva “Lending Teams,” and evaluates whether their openness, size, and categorization does or does not impact group lending behavior.  The working paper attempts to create an empirical taxonomy of both the top- and bottom-performing Kiva Lending Teams, and seeks to better understand how coherence around various forms of human identity can impel greater  cooperation.  While this study seeks to better understand the cooperative dynamics of many-to-one and many-to-many crowd-sourced microfinance, the observations are fungible.

For more information on the March 2010 working paper release, please see:

• Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society:
• Group Solidarity & Peer-to-Peer Microfinance on Kiva.org
• Cooperation Group

• Download:
  
• Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH)
• Social Science Research Network (SSRN)

• Stanford Graduate School of Business
  
• Kiva.org: The Dynamics of Group Lending (SSIR)
• Center for Global Business & the Economy

• Kiva.org
  
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