Performance Analysis of Peer-to-Peer Online Lending Platforms in China

In this paper we intend to check the performance of Peer-to-Peer online lending platforms in China. Different from commercial banks, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) platforms’ business process is divided into the market-expanding stage and the risk-managing stage. In the market-expanding stage, platforms are intended to help borrowers attain more money, and in the risk-managing stage, platforms try their best to ensure that the lenders’ money is repaid on time. Thus, with a sample of 66 leading big P2P platforms, and a novel two-stage slacks-based measure data envelopment analysis with non-cooperative game, the performance efficiency of each stage as well as the comprehensive efficiency are evaluated. The results show that the leading big platforms are good at managing the risk, although risk management is not the major concern of most P2P platforms in China. We also find that average performance efficiency of the platforms that are located in non-first tier cities is higher than that in first tier cities. This unexpected result indicates that development of the P2P industry may relieve the severe distortion of resource allocation and efficiency loss arising from unbalanced regional development. Then dividing the platforms into different groups according to different types of ownership, we verify that performance efficiency of the P2P platforms from the state-owned enterprise group is in a dominant position, and the robustness check indicates that the major advantage of the state-owned enterprise (SOE) group mainly lies in the risk management. We also make a further study to figure out the sources of inefficiency, finding that it mainly arises from the shortage of lenders, the lack of average borrowing balance, and the insufficient transparency of information disclosure. In the last section we conclude our research and propose some advice.