Publication
Title
What does your Facebook profile reveal about your creditworthiness? Using alternative data for microfinance
Author
Abstract
Microfinance has known a large increase in popularity, yet the scoring of such credit still remains a difficult challenge. Credit scoring traditionally uses socio-demographic and credit data, which we complement in an innovative manner with data from Facebook. A distinction is made between the relationships that the available data imply: (1) LALs are persons who resemble one another in some manner, (2) friends have a clearly articulated friendship relationship on Facebook, and (3) BFFs are friends that interact with one another. Our analyses show two interesting conclusions for this emerging application: the BFFs have a higher predictive value then the persons friends and secondly, the interest-based data that define LALs, yield better results than the social network data. Moreover, the model built on interest data is not significantly worse than the model that uses all available data, hence demonstrating the potential of Facebook data in a microfinance setting.
Language
English
Source (journal)
Journal of the Operational Research Society. - Basingstoke
Publication
Basingstoke : 2019
ISSN
0160-5682 [print]
1476-9360 [online]
DOI
10.1080/01605682.2018.1434402
Volume/pages
70 :3 (2019) , p. 353-363
ISI
000460067400001
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
Full text (open access)
UAntwerpen
Faculty/Department
Research group
Project info
Digitalisation and Tax (DigiTax).
Publication type
Subject
Affiliation
Publications with a UAntwerp address
External links
Web of Science
Record
Identifier
Creation 08.05.2018
Last edited 09.10.2023
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