The first rating agency: Lloyd’s Register’s first century
研究了世界首家评级机构劳合社注册簿从1760年到1860年的商业史，包括其从用户付费转向发行人付费的商业模式转变，对理解评级机构起源和演变有价值。
We reconstruct the business history of Lloyd’s Register, the world’s first rating agency, from its founding in 1760 to around 1860, when it began to extend its business outside the U.K. market. In the late eighteenth century this non-profit enterprise prospered by collecting, summarising and selling information on merchant ships to its subscribers, predominantly London underwriters. From 1798, competition from a new publication led to rising costs and falling revenues for both enterprises as they lost control of their proprietary information. When the publications were merged and relaunched in 1834, the new enterprise’s revenue came mainly from fees charged to shipowners and shipbuilders, a shift from a ‘user pays’ to an ‘issuer pays’ model. Over the century Lloyd’s Register’s subscriber base became more diverse in terms of occupations and came increasing from the rest of the U.K. and overseas.