Siva Viswanathan

TL;DR: It is found that the online friendships of borrowers act as signals of credit quality and increase the probability of successful funding, lower interest rates on funded loans, and are associated with lower ex post default rates.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study the online market for peer-to-peer P2P lending, in which individuals bid on unsecured microloans sought by other individual borrowers.

TL;DR: This article used data from a large online crowdfunding marketplace and employing a quasi-experimental design, found evidence that home bias still exists in this virtual marketplace for financial products and showed that rationality-based explanations cannot fully explain such behavior and that behavioral reasons at least partially drive this remarkable phenomenon.

TL;DR: The authors used data from a large online crowdfunding marketplace and employing a quasi-experimental design, found evidence that home bias still exists in this virtual marketplace for financial products. But rationality-based explanations cannot fully explain such behavior, and that behavioral reasons at least partially drive this remarkable phenomenon.

TL;DR: A stylized spatial differentiation model is developed to examine the impact of differences in channel flexibility, network externalities, and switching costs on competition between online, traditional, and hybrid firms, and indicates that in a static market, consumers rather than firms, benefit from increasing network Externalities.