The role of narrative style in a peer-to-peer lending market: an empirical investigation

ABSTRACT Decision-making behavior can be capricious and may vary from individual to individual. This paper provides a straightforward method for the empirical identification of the narrative style affecting financial decisions under time pressure. Punctuation, Chinese characters and sentence length constitute different narrative styles. Using data from Renrendai, we find that as the number and type of punctuation marks in narratives increase, the loan funding and repayment performance increase. Also, as the number of characters and long sentences in narratives increases, loan funding increases, whereas loan performance suffers. These conclusions remain valid after robustness checks.