In this section we identify the most important variables that affectthe success probability of the listing by using pair wise correlationtests. In order to perform the tests some of the variables had to betransformed. The most important transformation was done to the‘Status’ variable. This was transformed into a dummy variable. Thestatus ‘completed’ was entered as 1 and ‘expired’, ‘withdrawn’ and‘cancelled’ as 0. We do not know the reasons behind the borrower'swithdrawal decision. However, the number of withdrawn listings isvery significant, up to 30% of all listings. Therefore, we cannot excludethem all. It seems that a great majority of these listings has beenwithdrawn because of lack of interest by the bidders. Only 1% of allwithdrawn listings were fully funded. Apparently, some people do notwant to see their listing expire, if the bidders show only little interestin it. They would rather withdraw it and create a new listing withdifferent listing parameters. In total, there were 140,265 borrowerswho made listings on Prosper.com. Of these people, up to 67,297(48%) had multiple listings. Most of the people who made multiple listings had done so because their first listing did not get funded. Up to77% of the people who had made multiple listings had at least oneunsuccessful listing. This further underscores the point that theborrowers could really use a strategic decision support tool, whichwould help them in finding the right listing parameters the first time.For this part of the study, the credit grade scale AA–HR wastransformed to numbers between 1 and 7. This is an unorthodox wayof describing the credit grade, because the credit grade is ordinalscaled, not interval scaled as 1–7 would suggest. Later, this problemhas been solved by calculating each credit grade individually, but thisscaling allows easy preliminary examination. The funding option wastransformed into a dummy variable so that “Open for duration” wasentered as 1 and “Close when funded” as 0. The same approach wasused with the variable ‘homeownership’.