Online Peer-to-Peer (P2P) loan auctions enable individual consumers to borrow and lend money directly to one another. We study herding behavior, defined as a greater likelihood of bidding in auctions with more existing bids, in P2P loan auctions on Prosper.com. The results of an empirical study...

Providing explicit instructions to compare one option to other (reference) options is one of the most basic and commonly used promotional and persuasion tactics. Building on prior research on persuasion knowledge and the impact of suspicion, we propose that the mere fact that consumers are...