First-time Customers Vs Repeat Customers:Research On The Historical Behavior Information In Peer-to-Peer Lending

With the continuous development of P2P network lending,the user base of the P2P network lending platform has been increasing and the number of orders has steadily increased.In this process,the user population of the P2P platform tends to be stable.Users who have applied for loans for many times have become an important source of P2P platform orders,and the historical behavior information left on the platform can be the investment decision basis of investors.This paper uses historical behavior information as the entry point to solve the problem of information asymmetry between the borrowing and the lending parties of the P2P platform.Taking the transaction data of the "Renrendai" platform from December 2013 to July 2015 as the sample,the historical behavior information disclosed on the platform is processed and to replicate the historical behavior variables from the platform and construct new historical behavior variables based on the raw data.Empirical analysis finds that borrowers with historical behavioral information(i.e.,repeat borrowers)are easier to obtain loans than borrowers without historical behavioral information(i.e.,first-time borrowers),which means that historical behavior information can alleviate the information asymmetry between borrowers and lenders.Furthermore,repeat borrowers with historically successful borrowing behavior(i.e.,historically successful borrowers)are easier to obtain loans than those without historically successful borrowing behavior,which indicates that historically successful borrowing behavior and the historical behavior information generated by this behavior can further reduce the information asymmetry between the borrower and the lender.When examining the impact of specific historical behavior information indicators on both lenders and borrowers,this paper finds that investors consider not only the historical behavior information collected by the platform but also them contained in the raw data when making investment decisions.Raw data is also an important source for investors to obtain historical behavior information.This paper also finds that investors misinterpret some historical behavior information,which reflects how difficult to interpret historical behavior information.