Concealing borrowers’ failure history in online P2P lending: A natural experiment
研究了P2P平台隐藏借款人失败历史对融资成功率的影响，发现该政策虽帮助部分借款人，但整体成功率下降，尤其对低风险借款人影响最大，且长期效应减弱。
Abstract Online peer‐to‐peer (P2P) platforms both disclose and conceal borrowers’ information. Minimal research has been conducted on the impact of concealing such information on borrowers’ funding success. We fill this research gap by exploring a natural experiment opportunity at Prosper, an online lending marketplace where the platform enacted a policy to conceal borrowers’ past failure history. We first find that the platform's decision to conceal such information can be rational because when this information was publicly available, borrowers with past failures had lower success rates than borrowers without past failures. We next investigate the effect of hiding this information on lenders' lending decisions. Our empirical results from a series of analyses demonstrate that concealing such information helps some borrowers but also surprisingly leads to an overall lower success rate, which ultimately harms the platform and runs counter to the platform's intention. These effects are strongest for low‐risk borrowers and would attenuate in the long run. We further find that the number of borrowers’ past failures is associated with lower repayment ability.