摘要
众筹作为最受欢迎的互联网金融产品之一,受到工业界和学术界的广泛关注。基于现实背景,本文建立了两阶段众筹模型,研究了消费者估值不确定下消费者的策略性选择行为及其对众筹定价策略的影响。结论表明,若消费者参与众筹的额外效用较低,消费者估值不确定会造成“搭便车”现象,导致最优众筹价格不是关于项目所需资金的单增函数。当项目所需资金较低或较高时,发起人应该设置较高的众筹价格,否则应该降低价格以激励更多的消费者参与众筹。通过对比传统销售模式,本文揭示了发起人可以利用消费者估值不确定性及众筹的预售机制增加销量或边际收益以提升利润。进一步,本文证明了退款机制可以有效增加消费者参与众筹的意愿,从而提高众筹的可行域。最后,本文将基本模型拓展到更加一般的情形,研究发现众筹市场大小、项目运作风险和生产能力均对最优定价决策有不可忽视的影响。
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.
作者
徐扬
毕功兵
宋文
吴娟
XU Yang;BI Gongbing;SONG Wen;WU Juan(School of Finance,Anhui University of Finance and Economics,Bengbu 233030,China;School of Management,University of Science and Technology of China,Hefei 230026,China;School of Finance,Nanjing Audit University,Nanjing 211815,China)
出处
《管理工程学报》
北大核心
2025年第1期256-270,共15页
Journal of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management
基金
国家自然科学基金项目(72201001、72171214)
2022年度高校哲学社会科学研究一般项目(2022SJYB0362)。
关键词
众筹
定价决策
估值不确定
策略型消费者
退款机制
Crowdfunding
Pricing strategy
Uncertain valuation
Strategic consumers
Refund mechanism
作者简介
通讯作者:宋文(1983-),男,江苏徐州人,南京审计大学金融学院讲师,研究方向:供应链金融、绩效评估。
