Michal Herzenstein

Tell Me a Good Story and I May Lend You Money: The Role of Narratives in Peer-to-Peer Lending Decisions

We examine the role of identity claims constructed in narratives by borrowers in influencing lender decision making regarding unsecured personal loans. We study whether the number of identity claims and their content influence decisions of lenders and whether they predict longer-term performance of funded loans. Using data from the peer-to-peer lending website Prosper.com, we find that unverifiable information affects lending decisions above and beyond objective, verifiable information. Specifically, as the number of identity claims in narratives increases, so does loan funding but loan performance suffers, because these borrowers are less likely to pay back. In addition, identity content plays an important role. Identities about being trustworthy or successful are associated with increased loan funding but ironically they are less predictive of loan performance compared with other identities (moral and economic hardship). Thus, some identity claims are meant to mislead lenders while others are true representations of borrowers.

The Role of Decision Importance and the Salience of Alternatives in Determining the Consistency Between Consumers’ Attitudes and Decisions

This research examines how the importance of a consumer decision influences attitude-decision consistency and choice in decision contexts that contain versus do not contain specified alternatives. Results demonstrate that decision importance moderates attitude-decision consistency when alternatives are not specified, but not when alternatives are specified. These results, in conjunction with the time participants devote to choice, suggest that importance plays a larger role in attitude-decision consistency when alternatives are unspecified versus specified because importance leads to greater effort in generation of alternatives when alternatives are unspecified (an unnecessary task when alternatives are specified in context). Implications for promotion are discussed.