Moral Hazard and Peer Monitoring in a Laboratory Microfinance Experiment

Moral Hazard and Peer Monitoring in a Laboratory Microfinance Experiment

7 July, 2020    

Most problems with formal sector credit lending to the poor in developing countries can be attributed to the lack of information and inadequate collateral. One common feature of successful credit mechanisms is group-lending, where the loan is advanced to an individual if he/she is a part of a group and members of the borrowing group can monitor each other. Since group members have better information about each other compared to lenders, peer monitoring is often less expensive than lender monitoring. Theoretically this leads to greater monitoring and greater rates of loan repayments. This paper reports the results from a laboratory experiment of group lending in the presence of moral hazard and (costly) peer monitoring. We compare peer monitoring treatments when credit is provided to members of the group sequentially and simultaneously, and individual lending with lender monitoring. The results depend on the relative cost of monitoring by the peer vis-à-vis the lender. In the more typical case where the cost of peer monitoring is lower than the cost of lender monitoring, our results suggest that peer monitoring results in higher loan frequencies, higher monitoring and higher repayment rates compared to lender monitoring. In the absence of monitoring cost differences, performance is mostly similar across group and individual lending schemes, although loan frequencies and monitoring rates are sometimes modestly greater with group lending. Within group lending, although the dynamic incentives provided by sequential leading generate the greatest equilibrium surplus, simultaneous group leading provides equivalent empirical performance.

Similar Articles
The Influence of Affect on Heuristic Thinking in Insurance Demand
Heuristic thinking can influence human behavior in decisions under risk and uncertainty. In an experimental setting, we study whether emotional act...
Remittances and the Problem of Control: A Field Experiment Among Migrants from El Salvador
While remittance flows to developing countries are very large, it is unknown whether migrants desire more control over how remittances are used. Th...
Do Savings Increase in Response to Salient Information about Retirement and Expected Pensions?
How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As o...