The Internet has long been argued to have “flattened” the world. However, a variety of work has shown that frictions do remain, deriving from biases and preferences tied to individual-level differences, e.g., cultural, demographic, and geographic. Such biases, if present, are undesirable...

Biases in 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 a measure of religion distance between pairs of countries, which we incorporate...