Is the leaderboard information Useful to Investors?: The Leaderboard Effect in P2P Lending

摘要

P2P (Online Peer-to-Peer) lending provides an open marketplace where borrowers make requests for loans by lenders who subsequently decide whether to bid or not following an examination of the relevant information posted by borrowers. In this P2P lending context, the leaderboard, where popular loan requests are displayed at the web's front page, provides information for lenders to use when evaluating the requests. We empirically examine the effects of leaderboard information regarding the most popular existing loan requests. Our results show that the leaderboard information works ex ante in attracting additional bids to get loan requests successfully financed. However, it does not work ex post in improving the performance so that it has less potential for default.