Online Marketplace Lending

This book describes a functional approach to understanding Marketplace Lending and embeds it within a historical context. By understanding lending as a set of components and studying the interaction between the firm and markets, a number of insights present themselves. Most importantly, technological change is driving down contracting costs and information asymmetry between parties, driving more and more activities out of firms, as Ronald Coase’s Theory of the Firm would predict. This has only served to further the “unbundling” of lending, leading to different activities being carried out by specialized firms, more efficiently and at lower cost.