Biases on online platforms pose a threat to social inclusion. We examine the influence of a novel source of bias in online philanthropic lending, namely that associated with religious differences. We first propose religion distance as a probabilistic measure of differences between pairs of individuals residing in different countries. We then incorporate this measure into a gravity model of trade to explain variation in country-to-country lending volumes. We further propose a set of contextual moderators that characterize individuals’ offline (local) and online social contexts, which we argue combine to determine the influence of religion distance on lending activity. We empirically estimate our gravity model using data from Kiva.org, reflecting all lending actions that took place between 2006 and 2017. We demonstrate the negative and significant effect of religion distance on lending activity, over and above other established factors in the literature. Further, we demonstrate the moderating role of lenders’ offline social context (diversity, social hostilities, and governmental favoritism of religion) on the aforementioned relationship to online lending behavior. Finally, we offer empirical evidence of the parallel role of online contextual factors, namely those related to community features offered by the Kiva platform (lending teams), which appear to amplify the role of religious bias. In particular, we show that religious team membership is a double-edged sword that has both favorable and unfavorable consequences, increasing lending in general but skewing said lending toward religiously similar borrowers. Our findings speak to the important frictions associated with religious differences in individual philanthropy; they point to the role of governmental policy vis-à-vis religious tolerance as a determinant of citizens’ global philanthropic behavior, and they highlight design implications for online platforms with an eye toward managing religious bias.

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将宗教偏见置于背景中：离线和在线环境如何塑造在线亲社会借贷中的宗教偏见

在线平台上的偏见对社会包容构成威胁。我们研究了一种新的偏见来源对在线慈善贷款的影响，即与宗教差异相关的偏见。我们首先提出宗教距离作为居住在不同国家的成对个体之间差异的概率度量。然后，我们将这一措施纳入贸易引力模型，以解释国与国之间贷款量的变化。我们进一步提出了一组描述个人离线（本地）和在线社交环境的上下文调节器，我们认为这些调节器结合起来可以确定宗教距离对借贷活动的影响。我们使用来自 Kiva.org 的数据根据​​经验估计我们的引力模型，反映了 2006 年至 2017 年间发生的所有贷款行动。我们证明了宗教距离对借贷活动的负面和显着影响，超过了文献中的其他既定因素。此外，我们证明了贷方的线下社会背景（多样性、社会敌意和政府对宗教的偏爱）对上述与在线借贷行为的关系的调节作用。最后，我们提供了在线背景因素平行作用的经验证据，即那些与 Kiva 平台（借贷团队）提供的社区特征相关的因素，这些因素似乎放大了宗教偏见的作用。特别是，我们表明，宗教团队成员身份是一把双刃剑，既有有利的后果，也有不利的后果，总体上增加了贷款，但使所说的贷款向宗教相似的借款人倾斜。我们的研究结果说明了个人慈善事业中与宗教差异相关的重要摩擦；他们指出政府政策相对于宗教宽容的作用是公民全球慈善行为的决定因素，他们强调了在线平台的设计含义，着眼于管理宗教偏见。