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Record W2892304178 · doi:10.1126/science.1236498

The Diffusion of Microfinance

2012· preprint· en· W2892304178 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueScience · 2012
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicMicrofinance and Financial Inclusion
Canadian institutionsCanadian Institute for Advanced Research
FundersYale UniversityNational Science Foundation
KeywordsMicrofinanceCentralityPeer effectsExploitSocial network (sociolinguistics)PsychologyBusinessDemographic economicsSocial psychologyEconomicsComputer scienceEconomic growthStatisticsSocial mediaWorld Wide Web

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Introduction How do the network positions of the first individuals in a society to receive information about a new product affect its eventual diffusion? To answer this question, we develop a model of information diffusion through a social network that discriminates between information passing (individuals must be aware of the product before they can adopt it, and they can learn from their friends) and endorsement (the decisions of informed individuals to adopt the product might be influenced by their friends’ decisions). We apply it to the diffusion of microfinance loans, in a setting where the set of potentially first-informed individuals is known. We then propose two new measures of how “central” individuals are in their social network with regard to spreading information; the centrality of the first-informed individuals in a village helps significantly in predicting eventual adoption. Methods Six months before a microfinance institution entered 43 villages in India and began offering microfinance loans to villagers, we collected detailed network data by surveying households about a wide range of interactions. The microfinance institution began by inviting “leaders” (e.g., teachers, shopkeepers, savings group leaders) to an informational meeting and then asked them to spread information about the loans. Using the network data, the locations in the network of these first-informed villagers (or injection points), and data regarding the villagers’ subsequent participation, we estimate the parameters of our diffusion model using the method of simulated moments. The parameters of the model are validated by showing that the model correctly predicts the evolution of participation in each village over time. The model yields a new measure of the effectiveness of any given node as an injection point, which we call communication centrality. Finally, we develop an easily computed proxy for communication centrality, which we call diffusion centrality. Results We find that a microfinance participant is seven times as likely to inform another household as a nonparticipant; nonetheless, information transmitted by nonparticipants is important and accounts for about one-third of the eventual informedness and participation in the village because nonparticipants are much more numerous. Once information passing is accounted for, an informed household’s decision to participate is not significantly dependent on how many of its neighbors have participated. Communication centrality, when applied to the set of first-informed individuals in a village, substantially outperforms other standard network measures of centrality in predicting microfinance participation in this context. Finally, the simpler proxy measure—diffusion centrality—is strongly correlated with communication centrality and inherits its predictive properties. Discussion Our results suggest that a model of diffusion can distinguish information passing from endorsement effects, and that understanding the nature of transmission may be important in identifying the ideal places to inject information.

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Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.656
Threshold uncertainty score0.697

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.002
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.034
GPT teacher head0.243
Teacher spread0.210 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it