Can Social Notifications Help to Mitigate Payment Delinquency in Online Peer‐to‐Peer Lending?

Payment management is an operations management challenge in online peer‐to‐peer (P2P) lending. It is critical to control the cost of debt collection incurred in late repayments and defaults. We study whether and how a platform can leverage on borrowers’ social connections and use automatic social notifications in regulating repayment behavior. In collaboration with a large online P2P lending platform, we conduct a randomized field experiment to investigate the effect of social notifications targeted at different contact groups (core‐circle and peripheral‐circle groups). Our results indicate that notifying social contacts of a delinquent regarding the overdue payment significantly improves the repayment rate. Compared with the control group in which no notification messages are sent to social contacts, notification‐triggered social sanctions and social support reduce the default rate by more than 50% in both core‐circle and peripheral‐circle groups. Furthermore, we find that social notifications targeted at peripheral‐circle social contacts are only effective in the short term, and its effectiveness decreases with repeated use. By contrast, social notifications targeted at core‐circle social contacts have a lasting effect.