Risk-return modelling in the p2p lending market: Trends, gaps, recommendations and future directions

Abstract Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending is a market with significant growth in recent years. We review the academic literature published during the last decade on P2P lending to identify the main research trends and find potential gaps that limit stakeholders' use of research proposals. We perform both a bibliometric and systematic analysis. The bibliometric analysis will identify the most influential papers and the relationship and evolution of the main topics. In the systematic analysis, we categorized the documents according to methodological elements and business aspects. Remarkably, many proposals include artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms. However, many of them lack a proper understanding of the application context, the definition of potential variables in a business framework, explainability, etc. Such elements should be recognized as essential elements to exploit their benefits. In this respect, we provide some recommendations and show future research directions.