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Auctions for social lending: A theoretical analysis

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  • Chen, Ning
  • Ghosh, Arpita
  • Lambert, Nicolas S.

Abstract

Prosper, today the second largest social lending marketplace with nearly 1.5 million members and $380 million in funded loans, employed an auction mechanism amongst lenders to finance each borrower's loan until 2010. Given that a basic premise of social lending is cheap loans for borrowers, how does the Prosper auction do in terms of the borrower's payment, when lenders are strategic agents with private true interest rates? We first analyze the Prosper auction as a game of complete information and fully characterize its Nash equilibria, and show that the uniform-price Prosper mechanism, while simple, can lead to much larger payments for the borrower than the VCG mechanism. We next compare the Prosper mechanism against the borrower-optimal auction in an incomplete information setting, and conclude by examining the Prosper mechanism when modeled as a dynamic auction, and provide tight bounds on the price for a general class of bidding strategies.

Suggested Citation

  • Chen, Ning & Ghosh, Arpita & Lambert, Nicolas S., 2014. "Auctions for social lending: A theoretical analysis," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 367-391.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:86:y:2014:i:c:p:367-391
    DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2013.05.004
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    4. Andreas Dietrich & Reto Rey, 2020. "What Matters to Individual Investors: Price Setting in Online Auctions of P2P Consumer Loans," Papers 2003.11347, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2022.
    5. Zhenhua Wu & Lin Hu & Zhijie Lin & Yong Tan, 2021. "Competition and Distortion: A Theory of Information Bias on the Peer-to-Peer Lending Market," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 32(4), pages 1140-1154, December.
    6. Sirong Luo & Radha Mookerjee & Dengpan Liu, 2021. "The Effects of Auction‐based Pricing Mechanisms and Social Characteristics on Microloan Performance," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 30(2), pages 311-329, February.
    7. Soumajyoti Sarkar & Hamidreza Alvari, 2020. "Mitigating Bias in Online Microfinance Platforms: A Case Study on Kiva.org," Papers 2006.12995, arXiv.org.
    8. Zaiyan Wei & Mingfeng Lin, 2017. "Market Mechanisms in Online Peer-to-Peer Lending," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(12), pages 4236-4257, December.
    9. Christoph Bertsch & Isaiah Hull & Xin Zhang, 2021. "Monetary Normalizations and Consumer Credit: Evidence from Fed Liftoff and Online Lending," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 17(71), pages 1-47, December.
    10. Ivelin Elenchev & Aleksandar Vasilev, 2019. "Forecasting the Success Rate of Reward Based Crowdfunding Projects," Managing Global Transitions, University of Primorska, Faculty of Management Koper, vol. 17(1 (Spring), pages 51-77.
    11. Jianrong Yao & Jiarui Chen & June Wei & Yuangao Chen & Shuiqing Yang, 2019. "The relationship between soft information in loan titles and online peer-to-peer lending: evidence from RenRenDai platform," Electronic Commerce Research, Springer, vol. 19(1), pages 111-129, March.
    12. Bertsch, Christoph & Hull, Isaiah & Zhang, Xin, 2016. "Fed Liftoff and Subprime Loan Interest Rates: Evidence from the Peer-to-Peer Lending Market," Working Paper Series 319, Sveriges Riksbank (Central Bank of Sweden).
    13. Xiong Xiong & Zhang Jin & Feng Xu & Jin Xi, 2016. "Review on Financial Innovations in Big Data Era," Journal of Systems Science and Information, De Gruyter, vol. 4(6), pages 489-504, December.
    14. Kai Lu & Zaiyan Wei & Tat Y. Chan, 2022. "Information Asymmetry Among Investors and Strategic Bidding in Peer-to-Peer Lending," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 33(3), pages 824-845, September.
    15. Bertsch, Christoph & Hull, Isaiah & Qi, Yingjie & Zhang, Xin, 2020. "Bank misconduct and online lending," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 116(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social lending; Peer-to-peer lending; Auctions; Mechanism design;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D44 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Auctions
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

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