| Title | What's in a Face? An Experiment on Facial Information and Loan-Approval Decision |
| Authors | Chen, Zeyang Liu, Yu-Jane Meng, Juanjuan Wang, Zeng |
| Affiliation | Renmin Univ China, Sch Labor & Human Resources, Beijing 100872, Peoples R China Peking Univ, Guanghua Sch Management, Beijing 100871, Peoples R China |
| Keywords | STRUCTURE PREDICTS 1ST IMPRESSIONS TRUSTWORTHINESS ATTRACTIVENESS WIDTH COOPERATION JUDGMENTS SYMMETRY DICTATOR HEALTH |
| Issue Date | May-2022 |
| Publisher | MANAGEMENT SCIENCE |
| Abstract | Facial information is essential in daily life, but relatively little is known about whether seeing a face improves people's decision quality. This experimental paper studies the loan-approval decisions based on the historical cash-loan data with real repayment outcomes and exogenously varies whether and how a borrower's facial information is provided. We find that facial information does not improve subjects' decisions, despite the fact that it can predict repayment behavior in a machine-learning algorithm. This is because subjects have various biases in evaluating facial photos, and they rely excessively on facial information inmaking the loan-approval decisions. |
| URI | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11897/649336 |
| ISSN | 0025-1909 |
| DOI | 10.1287/mnsc.2022.4436 |
| Indexed | SCI(E) SSCI |
| Appears in Collections: | 光华管理学院 |
