arXiv:2611.03993 · v1
Whose startup does the AI back? An algorithm audit of reputation and demographic signals in LLM-assisted crowdfunding
摘要
Large language model (LLM) assistants increasingly advise backers on which crowdfunding campaigns to support. LLMs have known race and gender problems, and it is unsettled whether they reproduce, erase, or reverse the discrimination documented in entrepreneurial finance. We ask when, and through which decision process, LLM assistants use founders' gender and ethnicity. In a pre-specified choice-based conjoint experiment, seven LLMs chose among five synthetic campaigns with independently randomized quality signals and founder names, under three backer personas and a persona-free control (40,248 responses). By default, founder names barely matter: under budget-conscious and delivery-focused personas, gender and Black-name effects are statistically equivalent to zero. When the backer wants to support underrepresented creators, the models favor Black-signaled (+8.1 percentage points; positive in all seven models) and female-signaled (+5.1) founders. They do so most strongly among near-tied campaigns and for the founder who alone carries the signal, and they almost never name gender or ethnicity in their reasons. The results fit an agency account of algorithmic discrimination: an aligned assistant takes its demographic preferences from its user rather than from its training data.
作者备注：36 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables; includes online appendix. Accepted manuscript of the article published in Journal of Business Venturing Insights 26 (2026) e00682. Data, design files and code: https://github.com/Mirza-Samad-Ahmed-Baig/Whose-startup-does-the-AI-back-
期刊信息：Journal of Business Venturing Insights 26 (2026) e00682