“I Loan Because...": Understanding Motivations for Pro-Social Lending

As a new paradigm of online communities, microfinance sites such as Kiva.org have attracted much public attention. To understand lender motivations on Kiva, we classify the lenders’ self-stated motivations into ten categories with human coders and machine learning based classifiers. We employ text classifiers using lexical features, along with social features based on lender activity information on Kiva, to predict the categories of lender motivation statements. Although the task appears to be much more challenging than traditional topic-based categorization, our classifiers can achieve high precision in most categories. Using the results of this classification along with Kiva teams information, we predict lending activity from lender motivation and team affiliations. Finally, we make design recommendations regarding Kiva practices which might increase pro-social lending.<br><br>