When analysing Prosper.com data it is possible to find out all kind of things. E.g if there are regional differences to how talkative Prosper borrowers are when writing listings.

Prosper's most talkative borrowers live in:

as compared to:

Now, while that was fun, it is not really useful in any way or is it?

When looking at the length of funded listings, that became loans, by credit grade it gets more interesting.

Apparently the lower the credit grade the more detailed the description has to be to convince the lenders to bid to fund the loan.

Looking at the development of the description length of funded Prosper listings on the time scale  this chart is the result:

There are several possible causes that contribute to listings getting lenghtier:

• Borrowers take other listings as example and add on top of this
• Group leaders (or others) provide templates
• Competition for lender attention is getting tougher
• Borrowers detected that longer descriptions will increase chances (see HRs in table above) – unlikely

Suggestions?