Mitigating Bias in Online Microfinance Platforms: A Case Study on Kiva.org

TL;DR

This paper examines biases in online microfinance lending, especially how economic factors influence lender preferences across sectors, and proposes models with fairness constraints to mitigate these biases while maintaining performance.

Contribution

It introduces causal inference and Bayesian variable selection methods to identify and quantify sector-specific biases, and extends models with fairness constraints to reduce bias in microfinance lending.

Findings

Economic factors influence lender preferences differently across sectors.

Bias mitigation models with fairness constraints perform comparably to baseline models.

Empirical analysis reveals sector-specific biases in online microfinance platforms.

Abstract

Over the last couple of decades in the lending industry, financial disintermediation has occurred on a global scale. Traditionally, even for small supply of funds, banks would act as the conduit between the funds and the borrowers. It has now been possible to overcome some of the obstacles associated with such supply of funds with the advent of online platforms like Kiva, Prosper, LendingClub. Kiva for example, works with Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs) in developing countries to build Internet profiles of borrowers with a brief biography, loan requested, loan term, and purpose. Kiva, in particular, allows lenders to fund projects in different sectors through group or individual funding. Traditional research studies have investigated various factors behind lender preferences purely from the perspective of loan attributes and only until recently have some cross-country cultural preferences been investigated. In this paper, we investigate lender perceptions of economic factors of the borrower countries in relation to their preferences towards loans associated with different sectors. We find that the influence from economic factors and loan attributes can have substantially different roles to play for different sectors in achieving faster funding. We formally investigate and quantify the hidden biases prevalent in different loan sectors using recent tools from causal inference and regression models that rely on Bayesian variable selection methods. We then extend these models to incorporate fairness constraints based on our empirical analysis and find that such models can still achieve near comparable results with respect to baseline regression models.