Abstract—With the flood of traditional banks, state-owned assets, quoted companies and venture capitals into China's online lending marketplace, the competition among China's P2P platforms becomes more serious than before. To ensure survival and development, a large number of small and medium-sized P2P platforms in China are seeking to coordinate with other P2P platforms and external institutions (such as traditional banks, insurance companies, etc). However, in reality, it is difficult for certain inexperienced P2P platforms to accurately maintain the cooperation strength. To this end, this paper proposes a nonlinear growth dynamics model for China's P2P platforms, and studies quantitatively the relationship between cooperation strength and growth trend of P2P platforms by using the Lyapunov's first method in stability theory. The results show that the powerful P2P platforms may occupy the whole online lending market in the future. In addition, the small and medium-sized P2P platforms also can gradually narrow the gap with the powerful P2P platforms by adjusting the cooperation strength properly, and even it is possible for them to enjoy the same customer rate at some point in the future. The numerical simulation demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of obtained model, and some development proposals are further put forward for China's P2P platforms. The findings in this study give insights on how China's P2P operators coordinate reasonably the cooperation and competition.

Index Terms—P2P platforms, cooperation strength, mutual benefit and win-win, winner-take-all.

Xiaoji Wan is with College of Business Adminstration, Huaqiao University, Quanzhou 362021, Fujian, China. He is also with Oriental Enterprise Management Research Center, Huaqiao University, Quanzhou 362021, Fujian, China (email: wanxiaoji@hqu.edu.cn).
Liping Zhang is with College of Business Adminstration, Huaqiao University, Quanzhou 362021, Fujian, China.
Zhiguo Zhu is with School of Management Science and Engineering, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, Dalian 116023, Liaoning, China.

Cite: Xiaoji Wan, Liping Zhang, Zhiguo Zhu, "Research on the Competitive Strategy of China’s Online Lending Industry," International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 67-80, 2019.