The Importance of a Borrower's Track Record on Repayment Performance: Evidence in P2P Lending Market

In peer-to-peer (P2P) loan markets, as most lenders are unskilled and inexperienced ordinary individuals, it is important to know the characteristics of borrowers that significantly impact their repayment performance. This study investigates the effects and importance of borrowers' past repayment performance track record within the platform to identify its predictive power. To this end, I analyze the detailed loan repayment data from two leading P2P lending platforms in Korea using a Cox proportional hazard, multiple linear regression, and logit models. Furthermore, the predictive power of the factors proxied by borrowers' track records are evaluated through the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. As a result, it is found that the borrowers' past track record within the platform have the most important impact on the repayment performance of their current loans. In addition, this study also reveals that the borrowers' track record is much more predictive of their repayment performance than any other factor. The findings of this study emphasize that individual lenders must take into account the quality of borrowers' past transaction history when making a funding decision, and that platform operators should actively share the borrowers' past records within the markets with lenders.