Benchmarking the Operational Efficiency of China's Peer-to-Peer Lending Platforms Based on Data Envelopment Analysis

摘要

As a new financial loan model, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending has been widely spread across the world since emerging, especially in China. However, it often involves risk events, including difficult cash withdrawal, escaping with money, financial fraud, and trouble management etc. Therefore, how to evaluate its operational efficiency and determine a good platform plays a vital role in the operation of P2P lending platforms, which is also valuable for inexperienced lenders. In this paper, a data envelopment analysis (DEA) method was applied for measuring operational efficiency so as to separate efficient and inefficient P2P platforms in China. The results indicated that on the basis of the CCR model, the ratio of efficient and inefficient units in 60 platforms was 40% and 60% respectively; and the average of technical, pure technical and scale efficiencies of inefficient units were 0.700, 0.842, 0.800 respectively, which demonstrated that most of the difference between in efficient and inefficient units lies in the return to scale. The results also suggested the efficient benchmarking targets to guide inefficient units toward the efficient units.