Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a growing number of business models that facilitate economic exchanges between individuals with limited institutional mediation. One of the important innovative business models is online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, which has received widely attention from government, industry, investors, and researchers. Based on dual system framework and two-factor theory, this research proposes a research model to investigate the role of various signals from the P2P platform in affecting lender’s investment decisions. With data collected from PPDAI, a popular Chinese P2P lending site, we test the proposed model with logistic regression and hierarchical linear model. The results reveal that most of the factors perform significantly in lenders’ decision making. We also find the specific information of an auction itself is more important than borrower’s characteristics to a large degree. Finally, the research emphasizes that bid number performs well in moderating most of the relationships between variables.

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