Bryan Stroube
University of Maryland, Robert H. Smith School of Business
Institutional logics in the microfinance industry: An exploratory study of funding outcomes on Kiva.org

bstroube@rhsmith.umd.edu

Bryan Stroube is currently pursuing his PhD in strategic management at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. His research interests include how private enterprise and entrepreneurship can be used as development tools in emerging economies and how the public conceptualizes the relationship between organizations' strategic missions and their market action. Before coming to Smith, he worked at a Chicago-based consulting firm specializing in sales and marketing projects for the pharmaceutical and medical industries. He is a Research Fellow at the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship and spent his most recent summer in the Research and Strategic Initiatives Group at FINCA International in Washington DC, a pioneer of the village banking approach to microfinance with affiliate operations in 21 countries. He holds a master's degree in economics from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and English from Purdue University.

Institutional logics in the microfinance industry: An exploratory study of funding outcomes on Kiva.org

How do stakeholder-level logics support the function of institutional logics? This paper explores the logic that systematically governs individual lending behavior in a peer-to-peer microfinance context. Using historical lending data from Kiva.org, I examine which entrepreneur attributes, including photographic data, drive observed lending behavior. In line with related studies, I find that lending behavior is systematic and influenced by non-traditional information communicated through borrower photographs: the wearing of non-western clothing and being female, for example, both significantly improve funding outcomes for an entrepreneur. These results are interpreted in light of the broader issue of competing social and financial logics within the microfinance industry. This study's use of micro-decision data allows logics to be constructed directly from actor behavior rather than meta-level industry data aggregations. The outcome has implications for how institutional logics are supported by broader society and how entrepreneurs in emerging economies attract capital from more economically developed nations.