Prosper, today the second largest social lending marketplace with nearly 1.5 million members and $380 million in funded loans, employed an auction mechanism amongst lenders to finance each borrower's loan until 2010. Given that a basic premise of social lending is cheap loans for borrowers, how...

We investigate the widely-used rank-order mechanism for displaying user-generated content, where contributions are displayed on a webpage in decreasing order of their ratings, in a game-theoretic model where strategic contributors benefit from attention and have a cost to quality. We show that...

Prosper, the largest online social lending marketplace with over a million members and $207 million in funded loans, uses an auction amongst lenders to finance each loan. In each auction, the borrower specifies D, the amount he wants to borrow, and a maximum acceptable interest rate R. Lenders...

It has been repeatedly shown that in case--control association studies, analysis of a secondary trait that ignores the original sampling scheme can produce highly biased risk estimates. Although a number of approaches have been proposed to properly analyze secondary traits, most approaches fail...