| dc.description.abstract | Online peer-to-peer lending (P2P), a form of e-commerce that has emerged in recent years, has developed into a huge financial industry in China. Different from the usual case study, this article takes China as an example to assess the business performance of the P2P financial industry, and for the first time examines P2P lending activities from an efficiency perspective, so that low coverage of traditional financial activities in China, under the background of highly leveraged, may affect the key elements of lending activities, and the development of the industry. In this study, an improved meta-frontier data envelopment analysis was used to evaluate the operating efficiency of P2P platforms, and the method was improved to solve the interference factors of zero value, negative value, uncontrollable variables and other methods. Based on the characteristics of the industry, this study presupposes a two-dimensional paradigm of growth efficiency/operation efficiency, conducts two parallel analyses, and discusses the impact of various factors on platform performance in comparison. The research results have found the divergence between the development of P2P platforms and the operation efficiency; thus, it can be inferred that the extremely high growth rate may bring significant financial risks in reality. Meanwhile, venture capital investment, public capital participation and equity diversification help to improve growth efficiency, while listing and financial group participation can improve operation efficiency. The relative economic level of location has no significant effect on efficiency. There are also significant differences in the efficiency of different types of business, which are partly rooted in the social and financial environment rather than the characteristics of the industry itself. This means that the development of the industry mainly relies on the ＂conceptual＂ attraction of Internet color, rather than the core of risk control. Eliminating the acknowledged but unregulated state, bringing it into the formal financial sector and reinforcing its financial color, and weakening the bubble of the Internet and venture capital is a priority. | en_US |