竞争环境下众筹产品的定价策略研究

Pricing strategy of crowdfunding products in competitive environment

拥有想法却无法从传统渠道筹集资金的微创企业,可以通过在众筹网站发布众筹项目获取投资。然而,由于我国知识产权保护方面的法律尚不完善、申请专利时间长流程繁琐等原因,公开发布产品信息存在信息泄露的风险,拥有资金的其他企业可能模仿其创意生产类似的产品。本文研究这类模仿所带来的竞争对众筹企业在各阶段(众筹阶段与销售阶段)最优定价的影响。本文研究的主要思路是:通过建立各阶段的利润目标函数,得出相应的最优利润与定价策略,分析相关参数对各企业总利润与定价的影响,并以传统的银行融资模式为标杆,比较分析众筹融资下企业决策行为的变化。最后,本文将模型拓展到模仿具有成本的情况,进一步分析了此时众筹企业的决策行为和模仿企业的质量决策,探讨了模仿成本内生对企业决策行为的影响。

Crowdfunding is drawing extensive attention of entrepreneurs thanks to its low threshold and high success rate. Even in restrictive financial conditions, an entrepreneur possessing an innovative idea can seek public investment by sharing information on a crowdfunding website, announcing potential rewards such as the product the entrepreneur is going to produce, profits, equity etc. The first step to a successful crowdfunding is the pre-set amount of funding. The entrepreneurs will get the necessary resources to launch the project and later the benefits will be returned to reward the investors. Otherwise, the money raised by the public will be returned to the investors, resulting in no gains for the entrepreneurs. Although crowdfunding displays many merits, problems also arise, e.g., the theft of information, the recognition of the public for the products, and geographic position. These problems restrict the entrepreneurs launching a crowdfunding project. In this paper we study a situation in which company A launches a crowdfunding project while company B copies company A’s ideas and produces a substitutable product. We obtain the company A’s pricing strategy to maximize its profits in a competitive environment. The model is constructed as follows： First, company A sets the crowdfunding price and the public decide whether to join it. If the fund raised from the public does not meet the requirements, company A quits the market; otherwise, company A produces his product. At the same time, company B copies company A’s ideas and produces the substitutable product; Second,both company A and B enter the market and set their selling prices. In this model, consumers determine whether to take part in the crowdfunding, or buy after both products are competing in the consumer market. Those consumers who take part in the crowdfunding receive additional community benefits. We assume that the quality of company B’s products is lower than company A’s; in addition, we assume that information is symmetric, i.e., products’ qualities are public information. By modelling company A and B’s decision-making process, we obtain the optimal pricing strategy to maximize each firm’s expected profit. We study the influence of the related parameters on the pricing strategy and the corresponding expected profits. Furthermore, we set bank as a benchmark and study what difference the crowdfunding brings as compared to the traditional bank financing. In this paper, we find that the crowdfunding price and the profit of company A is decreasing in product quality of company B, and increasing in community benefits; choosing crowdfunding brings loss only when the bank credit rate and the community benefitsare low and the company B’s productquality is high. In other words, crowdfunding may bring better profits for small entrepreneurs in some situations. Finally, we extend our model to study the optimal quality of B’s product under different financing modes, with the existence of plagiarism cost. This further enhances our understanding on the influence of crowdfunding on the decision-making behavior.