Can investors' collective decision-making evolve? Evidence from peer-to-peer lending markets

This study tries to identify the accuracy of individual investors' capability to predict a borrower's creditworthiness in peer-to-peer lending markets and examine whether their ability is likely to evolve over time. The results of this study show that there is no significant difference between the predictive power of investors' ex-ante funding decision model and that of the ex-post repayment model over a borrower's repayment performance. Furthermore, the predictive power of investors' ex-ante funding decision over a borrower's repayment performance is shown to improve over time. It is also found that the main reason why investors' predictive power improves over time is because investors can assess more accurately the information provided by the platform operator and describe the borrower's characteristics. The results of this study are important as they confirm the possibility of optimizing and streamlining the P2P lending market, through the evolution of investors' decision making.