Research On Pricing Mechanism Based On The Innovation Project Of Start-ups In Reward-based Crowdfunding

At present,China's economy has entered a new stage of "new normal",facing many opportunities and challenges.Chinese government strongly encourages "mass entrepreneurship and innovation" to meet opportunities in economic reform and challenges in economic development.However,there are few successful entrepreneurs,one of the main reasons is that financing is difficult and expensive.Financing difficulties have become a worldwide problem for start-ups.At present,with the rapid rise of information technology,crowdfunding and other new Internet financial tools become popular in the world by virtue of the development of information technology,and also provide a good financing platform for start-up innovation projects.According to the types of returns,crowdfunding platforms can be divided into reward-based crowdfunding,debt-based crowdfunding,equity-based crowdfunding and donation-based crowdfunding.Due to the advantages of low legal risk etc.,start-ups often choose reward-based crowdfunding for funds.This dissertation focuses on reward-based crowdfunding,studies the pricing mechanism of crowdfunding for innovation projects of start-ups,builds dynamic game model with incomplete information,analyzes the operating mechanism of different pricing methods in crowdfunding,and discusses how to design reward structure for innovation projects,so as to provide theoretical support for start-ups to improve funding performance through pricing decisions.This dissertation firstly analyzes the operation mechanism of several pricing methods under the crowdfunding mechanism,and analyzes the differences between the cross-stage pricing method,versioning pricing method and early bird pricing method under the "all-or-nothing" mechanism compared with the traditional retail and E-commerce.The results show that:(1)for the cross-stage pricing method,in the crowdfunding environment,even if the market demand is small,there are no competitors and the product is highly innovative,in most cases,innovation project creators should still choose penetration pricing strategy to obtain more capital,which is inconsistent with the pricing theory in traditional retail and e-commerce;(2)with regard to versioning pricing method,even if the backers have a linear relationship in the valuation of products of different quality,versioning pricing strategy can still play an important role in obtaining additional capitals.However,in the classical pricing theory,the application of version control strategy is mostly based on the non-linear hypothesis of backers' valuation of products of different quality or the non-linear hypothesis of cost to product quality.The "all-or-nothing" mechanism of reward-based crowdfunding is another theoretical basis of versioning pricing method;(3)for the early bird pricing method,in the context of crowdfunding,due to the effect of "all-or-nothing" mechanism,the early bird pricing method can encourage backers with high valuation to pay higher prices while giving consideration to backers with low valuation to participate the process.The above analysis shows that each pricing method presents a unique performance in the context of crowdfunding.This dissertation then analyzes the applicability of single pricing method in reward-based crowdfunding.The study shows that:if the innovation project only chooses a single pricing method,in general,the early bird pricing method is more applicable when the degree of product quality differentiation is low,so it is unnecessary for start-ups to spend huge costs to design products with different quality differences.When the degree of product quality differentiation is high,versioning pricing method may still become the optimal pricing method under certain market conditions.The mix of different pricing methods forms the reward structure for innovative projects.Regarding the design of reward structure,this paper believes that:1)the project creators should first understand the characteristics of the online market of the project;2)select the appropriate quality differentiation level of the reward structure.Under the reward-based crowdfunding mechanism,the reward structure quality design of innovative projects is not only influenced by the inherent characteristics of products,but also should fully consider the market characteristics;3)select appropriate pricing methods to match the rewards with quality differences,so as to help the project creators fund sufficient start-up funds.The research results of this dissertation not only enrich the relevant literature in the field of crowdfunding,deepen the research on the pricing mechanism of reward-based crowdfunding,but also provide a reference for the pricing of reward-based crowdfunding for start-ups,which has certain practical significance.