| Since 2007, peer-to-peer lending (P2P) has been popular in China. As it meets the need of private financing and investment and then improves the use of social fund available, P2P has got very fast development these years. Considering the unsatisfying traditional financial service provided by commercial banks, such newly emerging financing means can complement the weaknesses of traditional financing means through more fast and convenient financing and more transparent lending process.However, because P2P is such a newborn thing originated from the internet, industry entry criteria and related regulatory laws and regulations have been immature yet, which causes a lot of risks involved with P2P platforms. From the second half of 2013 to now, a large number of P2P platforms were closed down, leading to more worry about P2P in China. In a word, worry about the borrowers and platforms constitute investors’worry about P2P. What’s more, when involved with a transaction, whether investors trust borrowers largely depends on the trust of P2P platforms. Therefore, trust of platform will have large impact on the willingness of platform users to participate in an online lending transaction. Compared with traditional financing means, P2P alleviates information asymmetry in the lending process in a way. Still, there exists the problem of information asymmetry between the platform and users, which means that to a large extent the risks suffered by users come from P2P platforms.Then, this paper makes analysis of what effect supervision and reputation mechanism will make on information disclosure of platforms. Through gaming analysis of supervision, this paper makes the conclusion that if supervision is taken as the sole mechanism to restrain information disclosure of platforms, imperfect supervising mechanism with too high supervising cost or not enough punishment would trigger fault disclosure, which would in turn cause the adverse selection problem in the market. Combined with income-cost comparative analysis of platform, it could be proved that reputation mechanism could effectively work as a complementary mechanism to restrain platforms’such behavior. According to the above analysis, effective reputation mechanism can not only share the supervisor’s pressure but also encourage platforms to disclose information more normatively. Moreover, through constructing a platform reputation model, this paper proves that reputation mechanism in effect could help reduce fault disclosure by encouraging platforms with higher future income, which could solve the information asymmetry and adverse selection problem to some extent.According to the above analysis results and previous research, combining the present situation of P2P, the theoretical hypotheses put forward by this paper are as follows:the lack of supervision will cause online financial platform to disclose fault information and under the circumstance reputation mechanism could effectively restrict platforms’ such behavior as a complementary mechanism. Based on the theoretical hypotheses, this paper sets such empirical hypotheses that considering Chinese P2P platform users are capable of distinguishing platforms with different values. A phenomenon of adverse selection appears in the information disclosure of P2P platforms and platform reputation mechanism could effectively mitigate the adverse selection problem. Through collecting rating data of P2P platforms published monthly by a third party website "www.wdzj.com", this paper constructs an empirical model for research and examination of the influence information disclosure and reputation have on platform trust. The empirical results basically prove the empirical hypotheses set previously and reputation could effectively work as a signal and reduce the information asymmetry between P2P platforms and users in China, though this reduction effect would be limited by people’s anticipation that P2P platforms do not operate for long and current immature state of P2P reputation mechanism. Accordingly, this paper puts forward countermeasures to improve the development of P2P industry and protection of users’ rights and interests, which are as follows:1)industry standard need to be established soon;2) laws and regulations related with P2P platform information disclosure should be published, supervision departments ought to be set up and relevant regulatory measures should be improved. What’s more, the establishment of credit investigation system and total sharing of credit information are also very crucial for normalization of information disclosed by P2P platforms and need to be finished soon. Therefore, this paper suggests that authoritative P2P rating institutions be established for improvement of P2P reputation mechanism. |
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