The Effects of Transactions Costs and Social Distance: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Jonathan Meer and Oren Rigbi ()

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2013, vol. 13, issue 1, 271-296

Abstract: We use data from a field experiment at Kiva, the online microfinance platform, to examine the role of transactions costs and social distance in decision-making. Requests for loans are either written in English or another language, and our treatment consists of posting requests in the latter category with or without translation. We find evidence that relatively small transactions costs have a large effect on the share of funding coming from speakers of languages other than that in which the request was written. Social distance plays a smaller role in funding decisions.

Keywords: social distance; translation; transactions costs; microfinance; charitable giving (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/bejeap-2012-0064 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Journal Article: The Effects of Transactions Costs and Social Distance: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:bejeap:v:14:y:2013:i:1:p:271-296:n:3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/bejeap/html

DOI: 10.1515/bejeap-2012-0064

Access Statistics for this article

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy is currently edited by Hendrik Jürges and Sandra Ludwig

More articles in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().