AON众筹模式下产品线设计与信息发布策略研究

针对众筹模式下如何激励消费者投资以实现众筹项目成功的问题,从信息发布和产品线设计的角度,通过两阶段博弈的理论模型,考虑了AON(all-or-nothing)模式下众筹方采用顺序发布和同时发布两种不同信息发布方式时,产品线的菜单价格和质量设计。研究表明:在顺序发布策略下产品线的质量差异化程度依赖于消费者异质性程度和高价值消费者的比例,和传统模式下产品质量相比,当消费者异质性很大同时高保留价格消费者的比例很高时,产品线质量差异和传统模式相同;当消费者异质性较小并且高保留价格消费者的比例较低时,产品线质量差异更小;当消费者异质性较小而高保留价格消费者比例较高时,产品线质量差异更大;而在同时发布策略下,产品线质量的差异化程度和传统模式相同,但价格差异与传统模式相比更大;相对于顺序发布策略而言,同时发布策略下由于极大程度的降低了消费者可能搭便车倾向,企业可以获取更多收益。这些结果将有助于采用AON众筹模式的企业在不同信息框架下做出最优的产品线质量设计和定价决策。

The Information Disclosure Strategy and Product Line Design and in AON Crowdfunding

Global crowdfunding has shown tremendous growth for the last couple of years. The startling rise of crowdfunding is drawing a high amount of interest in research as well as practice. How to design the optimal product and pricing decisions in a reward-based crowdfunding is an important question. Hu et al. (2015) developed a simple but elegant two-stage theoretical model and drew the conclusion that product line qualities are less differentiated in crowdfunding than in the traditional scenario under an optimal menu pricing strategy with the assumption that a high-type consumer always prefers low-price product if there is no risk of project failure. Their study commendably pointed at an important direction of research on crowdfunding for marketing scholars. However, the fact does not hold any more when product qualities are endogenized, because a high-type consumer can get either a larger or smaller surplus depending on the creator's offering and the market condition if there is no risk of project failure. Using a two-period theoretical model, the product line design is studied in sequential and simultaneous disclosure framework. The problem of product and pricing decisions in crowdfunding is revisited by fully incorporating individual rationality into a crowdfunding mechanism. It is found that in the sequential information strategy, qualities differentiation of the product line can be equally, less, or more differentiated in crowdfunding than in the traditional scenario, depending on the specific marketing conditions such as the heterogeneity of consumer and the proportion of high type consumers; in the simultaneous information strategy, the qualities differentiation will be always equal to the traditional scenario, surprisingly, the price gap in crowdfunding can be larger than in the traditional scenario, which means the entrepreneurs can set higher price in crowdfunding than traditional scenario even with the same product quality. It is also found that the simultaneous information strategy dominates the sequence information strategy in all market conditions because the former can decrease the propensity of free riding. With these new results, our findings provide important considerations for entrepreneurs to optimize their product line design and choose an optimal pricing policy in crowdfunding. The study contributes to not only the stream of product line decisions but also the growing literature on crowdfunding and sharing economy.