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We investigate the effects of team competition on pro-social lending activity on Kiva.org, the first microlending website to match lenders with entrepreneurs in developing countries. Using naturally occurring field data, we find that lenders who join teams contribute 1.2 more loans ($30-$42) per month than those who do not. To further explore factors that differentiate successful teams from dormant ones, we run a large-scale randomized field experiment (n = 22, 233) by posting forum messages. Compared to the control, we find that lenders make significantly more loans when exposed to a goal-setting and coordination message, whereas goal-setting alone significantly increases lending activities of previously inactive teams. Our findings suggest that goal-setting and coordination are effective mechanisms to increase pro-social behavior in teams.JEL Classification: C1, C93, D64, H41

This paper reports the results of a large-scale field experiment designed to test the hypothesis that group membership can increase participation and prosocial lending for an online crowdlending community, Kiva. The experiment uses variations on a simple email manipulation to encourage Kiva members to join a lending team, testing which types of team recommendation emails are most likely to get members to join teams as well as the subsequent impact on lending. We find that emails do increase the likelihood that a lender joins a team, and that joining a team increases lending in a short window (1 wk) following our intervention. The impact on lending is large relative to median lender lifetime loans. We also find that lenders are more likely to join teams recommended based on location similarity rather than team status. Our results suggest team recommendation can be an effective behavioral mechanism to increase prosocial lending.social identity | charitable giving | microfinance | field experiment | recommender systems

frequently challenge a human body or organism on a daily, seasonal, life-cycle, chronic disease, or age-appropriate basis. Thus, a physiological regulatory system is required to adapt beyond the conservative capabilities of homeostatic mechanisms. [3] When exposed to a stressor, human systems perform an allostatic adaptation, altering its metabolic or physiological activities through a series of nervous, cardiovascular, metabolic, or immune mediators [1,4] to adapt to an adverse stimulus. [3,5] This ability to achieve stability through change is critical for the body to combat internal and external stresses and adapt to the dynamics of its local environment. [1][2][3][4][5][6] Over the past 30 years, attempts have been made to understand physiology, behavior, and allostatic adaptation at the organismal level in large timescales. [5c,6a] However, investigating allostatic adaptation at a cellular level has not been well-explored yet. As basic biological units, cells independently and cooperatively adapt to changing conditions and stressors and contribute to tissue level homeostasis and allostasis. Distinct from large-scale organisms, cells operate in smaller dimensions and timescales. The primary cellular sensing and signaling transductive components, such as cell cytoskeleton (CSK) structures, integrin adhesive sites, and other intra and intercellular moleculars, [7] as well as lots of extracellular features and ligands [8] operate mostly on a nanometer-micrometer scale range, presenting smaller scale and more sensitive mechanisms than that of organismal-level allostatic adaptation. While cellular allostasis is rarely studied, the currently accepted view credits "homeostasis" for allowing cell physiology to resist biological or mechanical perturbations, wherein mechanical homeostatic tendencies have a critical role in regulating overall cell homeostasis. How a single cell allostatically adapts to a transient and local perturbations through multiple biochemical and biomechanical loops at a subcellular domain to achieve physiological balance remains poorly understood.Here, we observed an allostatic remodeling of cellular mechanics and morphological properties through a CSKmediated, energy-driven mechanoadaptative process, which diverges from traditional cell mechanical homeostasis mechanisms. Using live-cell imaging and a novel micromechanical tool, we were able to apply a transient and localized physical Allostasis is a fundamental biological process through which living organisms achieve stability via physiological or behavioral changes to protect against internal and external stresses, and ultimately better adapt to the local environment. However, an full understanding of cellular-level allostasis is far from developed. By employing an integrated micromechanical tool capable of applying controlled mechanical stress on an individual cell and simultaneously reporting dynamic information of subcellular mechanics, individual cell allostasis is observed to occur through a biphasic process; cellular mechanics tends...

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