Does the Media Attention Affect the Trading Volume of Online P2P Lending Platforms?

With the rapid development of the Internet and big data, online media has gradually become an important source of investor's access to investment information. Therefore, this paper mainly studies the influence of the media attention on the trading volume of online P2Plending platforms. We select 47 online P2Plending platforms from June 1, 2016 to May 31, 2018 as research samples, and use Baidu media index as a proxy variable forthe media attention to explore the direct effects of the media attention on the trading volume of online P2P lending platforms. Further, taking the investor attention as an intermediary variable, we examine the indirect effects of the media attention on platform volume by the investor attention.The study shows that the higher the media attention of online P2P lending platform, the higher the trading volumeand the investor attention plays a part of intermediary function in the relationship between the media attention and the trading volume of online P2P lending platforms.