Is information transparency important for funders? A case study of sharia P2P lending companies in Indonesia

Research aims: This study explores the importance of information transparency for funders as parties who provide funding to borrowers' projects. It also analyzes information transparency practices in sharia P2P lending. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study used a qualitative case study, focusing on three sharia P2P lending companies in Indonesia. Data were collected through interviews with parties from three sharia P2P lending companies and 11 funders. Research findings: It was found that information transparency is important for funders, increasing their confidence to invest. In addition, based on multiple agency theory, there is information asymmetry between funders and sharia P2P lending borrowers, which can be reduced by information transparency measures from funders, sharia P2P lending, and borrowers based on cost-benefit considerations. Theoretical contribution/Originality: This research explores the application of information transparency in sharia P2P lending companies, which, as far as researchers are concerned, has not been raised in previous studies. In addition, the study builds a conceptual framework of information transparency in sharia P2P lending companies based on multiple agency theory. Practitioner implication: The research has implications for applying information transparency in sharia P2P lending, which can improve information updates and communication from sharia P2P lending to its funders. Research limitation/Implication: The study only focused on three out of the seven sharia P2P lending in Indonesia. Therefore, the differences in business, focus, and other characteristics of the remaining four were not considered

Online Fundraising Through the Lenses of Law, Economics, and Sociology: Examples from American P2P Lending and Thai Rotating Savings and Credit Association

In recent years, online lending has become a new method of financing that allows people to lend and borrow anywhere anytime. Yet, due to its complex and wide-ranging operation, the online lending phenomena has become one of the most buzzing regulatory concerns. Online lending not only challenges incumbent loan providers like commercial banks by providing loans to unserved borrowers at attractive rates, it also presents unprecedented investment opportunities for individual lenders who are often referred to as ‘peer’ or ‘crowd’ to lend out their money commercially. In this dissertation, I explore how two different online lending methods help individual lenders who often lack financial sophistication to make safe investment and how laws and regulations may affect online lending businesses and their consumers. This dissertation includes two essays that examine two examples of online lending practices: peer-to-peer (P2P) lending in the United States and online rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) in Thailand. The first essay argues P2P lending platforms originally endorsed interpersonal relationships in lending and adopted many peer-to-peer features, such as social networks, personal profiles and group affiliations because interpersonal relationships are valuable and imperative for individual lenders and borrowers on P2P lending platforms. Nevertheless, the laws and regulations on P2P lending in the United States have caused P2P lending platforms to relinquish their commitments to utilize interpersonal relationships. The disappearance of interpersonal relationship on P2P lending platforms results in worse economic and sociological outcomes for individual lenders.The second essay argues that interpersonal relationship is paramount to the success of ROSCAs in Thailand. Traditionally, ROSCA participants rely on their interpersonal relationships to lend and borrow from each other. Recently, an online form of ROSCAs has emerged and spread. Online ROSCAs allow strangers, who have no interpersonal relationship to easily create a virtual ROSCA. Such a risk alarms the financial regulators, lawmakers, and the public. Nevertheless, the current regulatory landscape on ROSCAs have also been developed based on a long concern of frauds created by informal fundraising methods. While the current regulatory regime aims to ban and restrict ROSCAs which are operate beyond a local and personal level, the regulations effectively deem the whole category of online ROSCAs illegal and drove them to operate outside to the formal financial system. Both P2P lending in the United States and ROSCAs in Thailand utilize interpersonal relationships among parties of lending transaction to address four fundamental concerns in lending: uncertainty, information asymmetry, interpersonal trust, and institutional trust. From an economic perspective, Ronald Coase’s proposition suggests that personal relationships may help reduce uncertainty and information asymmetry in economic transactions including lending. From a sociological perspective, Francis Fukuyama and Linda Molm acknowledge the importance of interpersonal trust and institutional trust within financial exchanges. Interpersonal relationships among actors of a financial transaction can build and maintain interpersonal trust and institutional trust. This dissertation also applies both the economic and sociological perspectives to understand how laws and regulations might affect P2P lending platforms, and traditional and online ROSCAs. The studies of P2P lending platforms and online ROSCAs exemplify how the current laws and regulations which were developed based on more traditional financial methods can shift new financial services, particularly online lending, into a worse position

Decisions under Uncertainty in Decentralized Online Markets: Empirical Studies of Peer-to-Peer Lending and Outsourcing

Recent developments in information technologies, especially Web 2.0 technologies, have radically transformed many markets through disintermediation and decentralization. Lower barriers of entry in these markets enable small firms and individuals to engage in transactions that were otherwise impossible. Yet, the issues of informational asymmetry that plague traditional markets still arise, only to be exacerbated by the "virtual" nature of these marketplaces. The three essays of my dissertation empirically examine how participants, many of whom are entrepreneurs, tackle the issue of asymmetric information to derive benefits from trade in two different contexts. In Essay 1, I investigate the role of online social networks in mitigating information asymmetry in an online peer-to-peer lending market, and find that the relational dimensions of these networks are especially effective for this purpose. In Essay 2, I exploit a natural experiment in the same marketplace to study the effect of shared geographical ties on investor decisions, and find that "home bias" is not only robust but also has an interesting interaction pattern with rational decision criteria. In Essay 3, I study how the emergence of new contract forms, enabled by new monitoring technologies, changes the effectiveness of traditional signals that affect a buyers' choice of sellers in online outsourcing. Using a matched-sample approach, I show that the effectiveness of online ratings and certifications differs under pay-for-time contracts versus pay-for-deliverable contracts. In all, the three essays of my dissertation present new empirical evidence of how agents leverage various network ties, signals and incentives to facilitate transactions in decentralized online markets, form transactional ties, and reap the benefits enabled by the transformative power of information technologies

Cyberfinancing for Economic Justice

This Article argues for the socially optimal regulation of online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending and crowdfunding to advance economic justice in the United States. Peer-to-peer lending websites, such as Prosper. com orKiva.org, facilitate lending transactions between individuals online with-out the involvement of a traditional bank or microfinance institution. Crowdfunding websites, such as Kickstarter. com, enable individuals to obtain financing from large numbers of contributors at once through an open online request for funds. These web-based transactions, and the intermediary organizations that facilitate them, constitute emerging cyberfinancing markets. These markets connect many individuals at once, across class, race, ethnicity, nationality, space, and time in an interactive and dynamic way. During a time of significant economic distress in the United States, these markets also represent an unprecedented economic development opportunity for historically marginalized economic actors. Yet, no legal scholar has addressed the implications of these developments for economic justice in the United States. Drawing from the fields of law and geography, social networking theory, and comparative institutional analysis, this Article conceptualizes these new markets as cyberspaces, similar to geographic spaces, whose laws, norms, and rules will partially determine who will benefit from the economic opportunities that arise in these spaces. The recently enacted Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act does not facilitate substantial distributive justice in crowdfunding markets. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which produced a report in response to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act\u27s mandate that it study theP2P lending industry, has also failed to recommend a regulatory structure that will facilitate economic justice. This Article recommends that a range of federal regulators such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and the U.S. Treasury Department (Treasury), should collaborate to implement a revised Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) that would promote economic justice in these markets

FinTech, RegTech and the role of alternative lending: an analysis of the P2P platform LendingClub

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Fintech and the Innovation Trilemma

Whether in response to roboadvising, artificial intelligence, or crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, regulators around the world have made it a top policy priority to supervise the exponential growth of financial technology (or fintech ) in the post-Crisis era. However, applying traditional regulatory strategies to new technological ecosystems has proven conceptually difficult. Part of the challenge lies in the tradeoffs involved in regulating innovations that could conceivably both help and hurt consumers and market participants alike. Problems also arise from the common assumption that today\u27s fintech is a mere continuation of the story of innovation that has shaped finance for centuries. This Article provides a novel theoretical framework for understanding and regulating fintech by showing how the supervision of financial innovation is invariably bound by what can be described as a policy Trilemma. Specifically, we argue that when seeking to provide clear rules, maintain market integrity, and encourage financial innovation, regulators have long been able to achieve, at best, two out of the three goals. Moreover, today\u27s innovations exacerbate the tradeoffs historically embodied in the Trilemma by either reconfiguring or disintermediating traditional financing operations and the discrete services supporting them, thereby introducing unprecedented uncertainty as to their risks and benefits. This Article thus proceeds to catalogue the strategies taken by regulatory authorities to navigate the Trilemma, and posits them as operating across a spectrum of interrelated responses. It then proposes supplemental administrative tools to support not only market, but also regulatory data gathering and experimentation

How does P2P lending platform reputation affect lenders’ decision in China?

Purpose – This paper examines how the impact of Chinese P2P platform reputation directly and indirectly (mediate effect) affects investors’ (lenders) investment choices. Design/methodology/approach – Using data collected from 478 P2P platforms, this paper calculates Platform Reputation via a beta function after establishing the Reputation mechanism by Game Analysis. This is followed by testing both the direct effect of platform reputation on investors’ investment choices (proxying by transaction volume) and the indirect effect through credit enhancing information using three regression models (Median regression, OLS regression, and random effect OLS regression). A robustness test by adding instrument variables is conducted to confirm the findings from the main regressions. Findings – In China, P2P lending platform reputations have played both a direct and indirect (through credit enhancing information) roles on investors’ investment choices. Originality/value – This paper expands the boundary of P2P online lending research by not only examining the direct, but importantly, the indirect effects of platform reputations

Message Framing in P2P Lending Relationships

This paper investigates whether language and associated message framing (low-cost signal) can provide a solution to the risks generated by asymmetric information in P2P lending, drawing on the signalling and message-framing theories. First, it examines the extent to which message framing is associated with funding outcomes in the context of P2P lending; second, it investigates whether positive message framing reinforces the positive impact of credit ratings (high-cost signal) on funding outcomes. Our analysis is conducted on a dataset of 33028 listings of potential borrowers from a Chinese P2P lending platform using the Heckman selection models. We find that the use of positively framed messages is positively associated with positive funding outcomes and enhances the positive impact of the credit ratings on funding outcomes. Our results contribute to the literature on the effectiveness of low-cost signals in of Internet-based interactions while highlighting complementarities between different types of signals in P2P lending