Do Educational,Geographical And Gender Discrimination Exist On Peer-to-Peer Lending Platform?

Peer-to-Peer lending is different from the traditional lending on the specialty of investors.The discrimination of these non-professional investors against certain kind of borrowers can be divided into effective statistical discrimination and invalid preference discrimination.This paper uses empirical data of Renrendai to study in the education,geographical and gender discrimination on Chinese P2P platform,quantitatively analyzed the different groups by the degree of discrimination they suffered,and discussed the reasonable degree of discrimination through loan-pricing.First of all,borrowers in P2P market suffer vary degrees of discrimination on education,geographical and gender.The regression results of the overall sample show that poor educated,low-income area and male borrowers have disadvantage.Group test and interaction regression show that all borrowers suffer gender discrimination,but investors only discriminate poor-credit group on geographical area and degree,differences in preferences of creditworthy individuals are caused by the academy they graduated from.The degree of discrimination of the borrower's education are concerned with their age and industry,experienced higher education diploma is more valuable,and better educated,foreign universities graduated borrowers would efficiently improve their lending performance in education industry.By the borrower and the regional discrimination is of great relevance in the industry,IT,construction,transportation,finance,retail and other industries,the borrower the provinces are "equal" treatment,and manufacturing industry borrowers crowd the success rate with different regions showed great difference.Secondly,the paper test the reasonable degree of above nondiscrimination behaviors through loan pricing,finding that gender discrimination is effectively statistical,but the education and geographical discrimination are irrational preferred.Investors on P2P platform have relatively higher expectation on the default probability or interest rate on borrowers from certain provinces,and investors of highly educated people are overvalued,while loan repayment performance of poor educated borrowers are too pessimistic.The paper discusses on the degree and rationality of discrimination on Chinese P2P platform in several aspects,enrich the current research status in P2P discrimination behaviors.Research on these behaviors helps borrowers avoid unfavorable factors,lead investors to rectify their improper discrimination preference,as well as guiding the platform to design more rational investment consultancy,in order to optimize the efficiency of online P2P market.