Exploring the critical factors influencing online lending intentions

Background:Online lending(P2P lending)is a type of internet finance mainly used to meet the financial needs of small and medium-sized enterprises and groups of individuals.It is a supplement to the traditional financial system.Method:This paper uses PPDai.com—the most influential online lending platform in China—as a research object to study the leading factors that affect lenders’loan trust and perception of information asymmetry.It also studies the impacts of these factors on lending intention.Results:The results of this study show that the lending intention is mainly influenced by trust;perceived information asymmetry will affect trust,but it will not have a direct impact on lending intention.Trust is significantly affected by the borrowers’reputation and information integrity.Information asymmetry has various causes,including structural assurance and legitimacy.This perception of information asymmetry significantly prevents the further development of online P2P lending.Conclusion:The findings in this research imply that there are profound differences between online lending and online purchasing,thus the results obtained in the traditional e-commerce market cannot be applied in the field of online lending without verification.

Origin of the springtime South China Sea Warm Current in the southwestern Taiwan Strait: Evidence from seawater oxygen isotope

Oxygen isotope(δ^18O)of seawater is an excellent proxy for tracing the origins of water masses and their mixing processes.Combining with hydrographic observation,hybrid coordinate ocean model(HYCOM)analysis data,and seawater oxygen isotope,we investigated the source of the South China Sea Warm Current(SCSWC)in the southwestern Taiwan Strait and its underlying mechanism.Results show that the Kuroshio subsurface water(KSSW)can intrude the continental slope in the southwestern Taiwan Strait,and thereby climb up the continental slope coupled with upwelling.Theδ^18O-salinity relationship further indicates that in spring,the SCSWC in the southwestern Taiwan Strait originates from the upslope deflection of the slope current formed by the KSSW intrusion into the South China Sea,rather than from the west segment of the SCSWC formed to the east of Hainan Island.In addition,the southward flowing Zhe-Min Coastal Current(ZMCC)can reach as far as the Taiwan Bank(TB)and deflects offshore over the western TB at approximately 23.5°N,to some extent affecting the SCSWC.Moreover,this study reveals that seawaterδ^18O is exquisitely sensitive to the determination of the origin and transport of water masses as compared with traditional potential temperature-salinity plot(θ-S)and HYCOM analysis data.In addition,their coupling can more reliably interpret the mixing processes of shelf water masses.

Low threshold anti-Stokes Raman laser on-chip

Raman lasers based on integrated silica whispering gallery mode resonant cavities have enabled numerous applications from telecommunications to biodetection. To overcome the intrinsically low Raman gain value of silica, these devices leverage their ultrahigh quality factors(Q), allowing submilliwatt stimulated Raman scattering(SRS) lasing thresholds to be achieved. A closely related nonlinear behavior to SRS is stimulated anti-Stokes Raman scattering(SARS). This nonlinear optical process combines the pump photon with the SRS photon to generate an upconverted photon. Therefore, in order to achieve SARS, the efficiency of the SRS process must be high. As a result, achieving SARS in on-chip resonant cavities has been challenging due to the low lasing efficiencies of these devices. In the present work, metal-doped ultrahigh Q(Q > 10~7) silica microcavity arrays are fabricated on-chip. The metal-dopant plays multiple roles in improving the device performance. It increases the Raman gain of the cavity material, and it decreases the optical mode area, thus increasing the circulating intensity. As a result, these devices have SRS lasing efficiencies that are over 10× larger than conventional silica microcavities while maintaining low lasing thresholds. This combination enables SARS to be generated with submilliwatt input powers and significantly improved anti-Stokes Raman lasing efficiency.