Abstract
The peer-to-peer lending market has developed rapidly over the past decade and reveals a severe problem of information asymmetry. This research constructed a four-party evolutionary game model to analyze the influence pathway of the guarantee mechanism on the users’ participation of the peer-to-peer lending platform and conducted an empirical study applying the mediating effect model and simultaneous equation model based on data of China’s peer-to-peer lending platform. The theoretical model shows that the guarantee mechanism reduced the participation of borrowers of the peer-to-peer lending platform through a screening effect, but increased the participation of investors through a signal effect. In the case of the platform self-guarantee, there existed a self-screening effect, whose influence on the participation of investors depended on the strength of external constraints imposed on the platform enterprises. Further, the empirical study shows that during the sample period, the platform self-guarantee mechanism reduced the scale of borrowers and investors of the peer-to-peer lending platform at the same time, thus reducing the transaction volume of the platform. Although the third-party guarantee mechanism reduced the scale of borrowers, it increased the scale of investors, and the comprehensive effect was to increase the transaction volume of the platform. On this basis, this research puts forward suggestions such as strengthening the qualification examination of the platform enterprises, transforming the platform self-guarantee mechanism into the third-party guarantee mechanism, and introducing more signal mechanisms.
Highlights
In a peer-to-peer lending platform, borrowers publish the information of their projects, and investors search for suitable projects according to the information displayed on the platform, while the platform enterprises match the transaction between these two groups of users, benefitting from the corresponding interaction [11,12]
The main conclusions are as follows: (1) The platform self-guarantee mechanism reduced the participation of the borrowers through a “screening effect”, while it increased the participation of the investors through a “signal effect”
For China’s peer-to-peer lending platform, during the sample period, the introduction of platform self-guarantee mechanism reduced the average number of borrowers by 29,825 and the average number of the investors by 10,756
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. In a peer-to-peer lending platform, borrowers publish the information of their projects, and investors search for suitable projects according to the information displayed on the platform, while the platform enterprises match the transaction between these two groups of users, benefitting from the corresponding interaction [11,12] In this way, the transaction relationship involves three parties and is no longer the traditional mode which only relates to the “seller” and “buyer”. Theoretical researches show that a guarantee mechanism can alleviate the problem of information asymmetry; it is of great significance to discuss the impact of guarantees on a peer-to-peer lending platform
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