Analysis on the Imitation Effect of Investment Decisions in Internet Lending Market

Nowadays, internet lending has become an important model that cannot be ignored in China financial lending market. Based on the individual transaction data of Chinese Paipaidai website, this paper examines the existence, rationality, decline and heterogeneity of the imitation effect of lenders’ investment decisions in China internet lending market. It is found that the potential lenders’ investment decisions imitation effect in the internet lending market is influenced by the previous cumulative bid times and the previous cumulative fundraising amount. With the decrease of information transmitted by the characteristics of imitation effect, the follow-up imitation effect of potential lenders will become more and more rational, and the imitative effect will gradually decrease and eventually disappear after reaching a certain peak value, furthermore, the lenders’ investment decision imitation effect of loan orders with poor information disclosure is more prominent than that of orders with perfect information disclosure. The research shows that the imitation effect of lenders’ investment decisions is mainly related to incomplete information disclosure in the internet loan market, and the paper’s outcome is important for us to exhaustively understand the risk accumulation caused by lenders’ investment decisions imitation effect and how to solve the information disclosure mechanism problem effectively.