Management Science and Information Systems' Seminar（2017-01）

Topic: When Microfinance meets Crowdfunding

Speaker: Chong Wang, City University of Hong Kong

Time: Wednesday, Jan.4th, 9:30-11:30

Place: Room 216, No.2 Guanghua Building

Abstract:

While Internet platforms may bypass traditional intermediaries, some Internet platforms reach target customers through collaborations with offline service providers, especially when the target customers are underprivileged or hard to reach. Such collaboration is not only essential for the online platform; it also brings changes to the operation of the offline service. We analyze the impacts of the collaboration between microfinance institutions (MFIs) and one of the largest prosocial lending platforms, Kiva.org. We found that partnership with Kiva not only brought MFIs new capital resources, it also helped to improve the management efficiencies. To empirically establish the causal impacts, we considered a few robustness checks. We further empirically investigate the routes of achieving such efficiency gain. We discuss the implications of our findings for microfinance, prosocial lending, and traditional organizations adding an online touch by owning or collaborating with online platforms.

Introduction:

Chong Wang, Assistant Professor, Department of Information Systems,City University of Hong Kong, since July 2012.

Research Interests: Online social network analytics; Mechanism design in platform business; Financial information technology innovation; Privacy in online social networks; IT impacts on the economy

Your participation is warmly welcomed!