Abstract: P2P lending, due to the prominent asymmetric information, lenders are prone to make irrational decisions, which lead to the increase of transaction risks Through using the valid transaction data from “PPDai” website and based on the Logistic regression model, the lending intention model for lenders and the default behavior model for borrowers are constructed, the influence of related variables on lending intention and default behavior is compared, and the rationality of decision variables is explored in a comprehensive and detailed way The results indicate that lenders have irrational decision-making phenomena Lenders tend to make the first type of errors towards variables such as “student occupation”, and commit the second type of errors towards variables such as “video authentication” Therefore, this research helps to identify the irrational decision variables and further provides guidance for enhancing lenders abilities of risk identification, optimizing lenders decision, regulating information revelation mechanism of P2P platform, improving the credit system of P2P platform and reducing credit risk in P2P lending

Key words: P2P lending, lender, irrational decision