Smiles in Profiles: Improving Efficiency While Reducing Disparities in Online Marketplaces (opens in new tab)

Online platforms often have conflicting goals: they face tradeoffs between increasing efficiency and reducing disparities, where the latter may relate to objectives such as the longer-term health of the marketplace or the organization's mission. We examine how participants' profile pictures shape this trade-off in the context of a peer-to-peer lending platform. We develop and apply an approach to estimate marketplace participants' preference...