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.

This study attempts to identify gender and age discrimination by individual lenders in P2P lending markets by analyzing empirical transaction data from multiple platforms including Moneyauction, Popfunding, and 8percent. To do this, the study investigates the effects and importance of a borrower’s gender and age on individual lenders’ preferences and a borrower’s actual repayment performance using multiple linear regression and relative weight analyses. As a result, no gender discrimination is found in the three Korean P2P lending markets, and such indiscrimination is rational, on the grounds that the borrower’s gender does not have a statistically significant impact on the lenders’ preferences as well as his/her actual repayment performance, and its relative importance is minimal. While, there marginally exists age discrimination against a borrower in the markets, and such ageism is likely to be irrational, on the grounds that the borrower’s age has a partly significant and minimally important impact on the lenders’ preferences, but has no significant and important impact on his/her repayment performance. For the first time, these findings help to clarify gender and age discrimination issues in the P2P lending market by identifying the rationality of individual lenders’ preferences to the borrower’s gender and age in the Korea.