Constraints On The Survival Of P2P Online Lending Platform As Information Intermediary

Since China's first P2P online lending platform--Paipaidai was founded in 2007,few years later,the increasing loan scale and number of platforms present the fast development of online lending indusrty.However,at the same time,a lot of serious cases about P2P platform fund-raising fraud and escape represented by "ezubao" have been happening frequently,which attracted strong social attention of the mass to P2P platform.Studies suggest that the emergence of these problems is due to P2P platform playing the role of credit intermediary.And P2P platform was officially defined as information intermediary by Measures of online lending regulation issued by China government,but reaserch suggests that P2P platform which is included in Internet finance cannot get rid of credit intermediary effectively.Hence,this paper wants to explore the reason why P2P platform as information intermediary undertakes the responsibility of credit intermediary through studying the suvival logic of P2P online lending platform.This article starts from the information intermediary function,analysing the preconditions for P2P online lending platform as information intermediary.Then,combining the pratical situation of China's P2P online lending market,the analysis find that investors can only rely on the P2P platform's good reputation for ensuring the infomation quality when all the preconditions can not be met.Therefore,platform reputation is the basis of P2P platform performing infomation intermediary functions.And through theoretical and empirical analysis of P2P reputation,this paper builds a multivariate regression model related to P2P platform's reputation,using P2P platform's rating data announced monthly by a P2P industry portal and fixed effect model to testify and some relevent conclusions are made.The result shows that the current P2P lending market in China is far from mature,the reputation of P2P platform not being established and the value of reputation has not been fully reflected.P2P plaform defining as information intermediary purely lacks the support of system and reality.The reputation of P2P platform has not been established,which badly restrains the valid performance of information intermediary functions of P2P platform,making the P2P network platform as an information intermediary harder to survive.