IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/hal-04159814.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Bids for Speed: An empirical Study of Investment Strategy Automation in a Peer-to-Business Lending Platform

Author

Listed:
  • Eric Darmon

    (EconomiX - EconomiX - UPN - Université Paris Nanterre - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

We investigate how introducing a bidding agent impacts the process and outcome of an online reverse auction in the context of a crowdlending platform. We consider this issue in the context of a peer-to-business platform that connects individual lenders to small and medium-sized enterprises. Using a before/after study design, we perform an econometric analysis and find that introducing a bidding agent had a positive and dramatic impact on the number of bids and bidders and reduced the time necessary to collect the funds. For projects with lower ratings, it also positively impacted the number of lenders and indirectly enhanced portfolio diversification. We find that after the bidding agent was introduced, well-rated projects benefited from lower interest rates, the magnitude of the change depending positively on their rating. These results provide evidence that the bidding agent generates savings in the screening and bidding costs incurred by lenders and benefits both sides of the platform. Our contribution documents the role of bidding agent as a strategic tool to enhance financial intermediation. It also sheds light on how two types of decision support systems (rating-based and bidding agent) interact and shows that this interaction is of crucial importance with respect to the financial regulation of platforms if the crowd has low financial literacy.

Suggested Citation

  • Eric Darmon, 2022. "Bids for Speed: An empirical Study of Investment Strategy Automation in a Peer-to-Business Lending Platform," Working Papers hal-04159814, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-04159814
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04159814
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hal.science/hal-04159814/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-04159814. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.