Abstract: Does the creditor's right assignment of investors on P2P lending platforms convey information about the default risk of the loan? Relevant academic researches are absent. Based on the 72.461519 million debt transfer events generated from 417,691 bids on the P2P platform 'RenRenDai' and the large sample data of more than 100 million investment events, this paper studies the debt transfer behaviors in P2P online lending. The results show that the transfer of creditor's rights on the RenRenDai platform is widespread, with more than 90% of the underlying debt transferred. On the average, the creditor's rights under each loan bid get transferred for more than 170 times, and the cumulative amount of the transfer of creditor's rights is several times of the original loan amount. Based on the results from the perspective of risk identification, it is found that for more times, in larger amount and to more transferees the underlying creditor's right are transferred, the higher default risk may happen to the underlying loan, which indicates that the transfer of creditor's right has certain risk identification effect. Further analysis also finds that such risk identification effect of creditor's rights transfer is more prominent when the interest rate is high and the borrower is unmarried and/or has no house assets, which reveals that the transfer behavior of investors can provide incremental risk identification information, and there is a substitutional relationship between creditor's rights transfer behavior and traditional borrowers' characteristics. In addition, further research also shows that learning effect and experience accumulation are what transferring-investors rely mainly on to gain information advantage.

Key words: peer-to-peer lending, credit assignment, risk identification, learning effect