Resumen de Friendships in Online Peer-to-Peer Lending: Pipes, Prisms, and Relational Herding
De Liu, Daniel J. Brass, Yong Lu, Dongyu Chen
This paper investigates how friendship relationships act as pipes, prisms, and herding signals in a large online, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending site. By analyzing decisionsof lenders, we find that friends of the borrower, especially close offline friends, act as financial pipesby lending money to the borrower. On the other hand, the prismeffect of friends' endorsements via bidding on a loan negatively affects subsequent bids by third parties. However, when offline friends of a potential lender, especially close friends, place a bid, a relational herdingeffect occurs as potential lenders are likely to follow their offline friends with a bid.
