New 'Requests in Front of You' Feature (RS)

It really is pointless getting excited or despondent about daily figures without knowing the investment sizes.

A single request processed in a day could be £10 or £1,000,000. Without knowing which, the information is borderline useless.

Ignoring the size of the investments, as we dont know anything, and just focussing on the numbers of requests

Aju is handy as he did the requests quite late and covered all the markets. The sheer number in access compared to 1yr and 5yr is clearly why there seems to be so much more progress in the legacy ones as opposed to the new ones.

I do wonder what RS will do when they get to the end of the 1yr and 5yr, which is actually in sight.

Could they possibly move loans from new to old. They cannot move investors money, but they could surely move the loans themselves from one market to another

Personally I think you underestimate the extent to which companies use psychology to influence actions of customers, particularly in online situations.  The introduction of "friction" to make doing things they don't want you to do is one example.  All of their incentives are to keep as many customers as possible, as that's how they get paid.  For people who have already RYI'd, they will have tested on a sample that NOT providing this information was resulting in people NOT cancelling their RYIs, conversely providing this information resulted in more people cancelling the RYIs.  I guess it is because being shown progress is being made in whittling down the queue, however small, gives you a feeling that the company is keeping its head down and getting on with business, it isn't going to go bust any time soon, it reassures you they are not throwing their hands up and surrendering, and hence you are more open to cancelling an RYI as you are less concerned you are going to lose everything.  They will have talked long and hard about this before changing the interface. On the other hand, you could be right! But my experience of corporate life suggests no change is made just because customers ask for it.  You make changes because they benefit you.  Somethimes those two things are mutually exclusive, sometimes not.

As it happens, I had Game Theory very much in my mind when I made my post just a few notches up in this thread. However, I'd like to challenge the "zero benefit" assumption.

IF it is the case that your RYI is almost certainly not going to hit the front of the queue before it repays anyway - which in the case of the Access market, by the look of things, is quite a lot of RYI requests - then you might want to argue that keeping the RYI in place has no benefit to you and possibly a small disbenefit. If all of the people in that position cancelled their RYIs, then the platform would look a lot healthier. Remember that if the platform crashes then all investors stand to make some losses.

And the difference between this and classic "Game Theory" scenarios is that there is no benefit to the odd renegade trying to get one over on everyone else by not joining in. Their RYI is never going to happen.

(Well, almost "never" - of course, if lots of people further up the queue also cancelled then some of these impossible RYIs might come back into play - but if that starts to happen then we'd be looking at a return to normal conditions, which would be an entirely different bag of potatoes).

The main practical difficulty is determining where the cut off comes, mainly because its not as simple as identifying a Request Number after which all RYIs are doomed, because it varies depending on the mix of loans that you happen to have. But you wouldn't have to be exact - if we could make a decent approximation and add some contingency you could say with a reasonable degree of confidence that XXXXX is the upper likely limit and anyone above that might as well cancel...

Clearly I was wrong that no-one wanted game theory chat   [I've used some labelling]

1) Agreed re the latter part - this is the 'group benefit' that I was referring to. For me, the assumption in your initial sentence, though, is uncertain enough to be outweighed by the negative consequences of you being wrong about this and losing your place in the RYI queue. For this reason, I would still argue that there is no individual benefit here (although I appreciate this is perhaps more up for debate than the simplicity of my previous post may imply).

2) Yes, this is much more complex than a simple prisoner's dilemma game or the like. In fact, you'd have to make quite a few assumptions about how this all goes over the next few months to be able to model it, I guess.

3) For my reasons above, I think this is so uncertain as to not be possible (or at least, decent enough to be at all helpful). As you suggest yourself, a change in sentiment that saw lots of cancellations (and possibly more re-investment, and even new investors!) could make this situation change hugely. Then again, I'm entirely skeptical of all this sort of rationalist modelling anyway - I do a different sort of social science that economists would call mumbo-jumbo nonsense 

For me mainly 5Y advanced by similar amount as for previous day.
The 5Y progress bar looks to have been corrected -- previously it was showing progress from 10-July -- now it looks more correct for overall queue since RYI created as for the other markets.
(perhaps they re-ran the update having fixed the 5Y bug so the latest figures may be partial for today)