Pricing strategy and refund mechanism in reward-based crowdfunding with consumer valuation uncertainty
The mismatch between the supply and demand of financial services and the rapid development of Internet technology have given birth to Internet finance.As one of the most popular Internet financial products,crowdfunding has attracted wide attention from academia and industry.It has alleviated the financing dilemma of small and medium-sized enterprises to some extent,but there is still the problem of insufficient financing efficiency.In order to reveal the operational mechanism of crowdfunding and improve its performance,many scholars studied the optimization of pricing strategy under the crowdfunding mode.However,the current crowdfunding literature does not consider the impact of consumer valuation uncertainty.Crowdfunding products are relatively new,and the delivery of goods occurs after purchase,so consumers do not know whether the products match their preferences when they participate in crowdfunding,thus facing the risk of valuation uncertainty,which will affect consumers'purchasing behavior and pricing strategies.This paper establishes a two-period crowdfunding model and studies the optimization of pricing strategy for crowdfunding with consumer valuation uncertainty.Consider a creator launching a crowdfunding campaign to fund a project in the first period and continuing to sell products to new consumers entering the market in the second period.By using backward induction to analyze and solve the optimal pricing strategy,we find:1)there may be free-riding behavior in the crowdfunding mode.When the capital demand is small and the crowdfunding price is high,partial consumers will wait to buy the products at the retail stage to avoid the valuation uncertainty risk;2)The optimal crowdfunding price is not always a monotone increasing function of the capital demand.If the additional utility of participating in crowdfunding is low,the creator should set a high crowdfunding price when the capital demand is low or high;otherwise,the creator should reduce the price to encourage more consumers to participate in crowdfunding.3)Compared with the traditional sales mode,the creator can take advantage of the consumer valuation uncertainty and the pre-sale mechanism of crowdfunding to increase sales volume or marginal revenue to improve profits.Further,we examine whether the refund mechanism is beneficial.The results show that when the capital demand is small,the refund mechanism damages the creator's profits.Counterintuitively,the refund mechanism can effectively increase the willingness of consumers to participate in crowdfunding,thus improving the feasible area of crowdfunding when the capital demand is high.Finally,we extend the model to a more general case and discuss the effects of market size,project operation risk,and limited production capacity on the optimal pricing decision.Based on the research conclusions,we provide the following management implications:First,creators can prevent consumers'strategic waiting behavior by lowering the crowdfunding price,especially for art performance projects,consumers'participation in crowdfunding has high additional utility and only a slight reduction in the price can motivate consumers to participate in crowdfunding.Second,for crowdfunding projects with high capital demand,consumers will also worry that the project can not obtain sufficient funds and eventually lose the desired product.Therefore,creators should try to convey the signal of fund shortage to consumers and guide them to invest in crowdfunding projects as soon as possible.If the capital demand is very high,the refund mechanism should be adopted to increase consumers'willingness to pay,so as to increase the financing amount.Third,the pricing strategies of crowdfunding projects released on different crowdfunding platforms are also different.For example,when launching a project on a large crowdfunding platform such as Kickstarter,creators should adopt the principle of"small profits and quick returns".However,when a project is released on the Modian crowdfunding platform,the price should be set relatively high due to the smaller number of consumers.Finally,the impact of operational risk and capacity constraints on pricing should not be ignored.For games and other projects that are difficult to develop,creators should set a preferential price strategy to attract consumers to participate.For artistic performance projects,since the risk is very low and the service capacity is limited,creators have a pricing advantage,it is better to raise the crowdfunding price to obtain more profits.
万方数据
维普
