Research On The Optimal Reward Scheme In Equity-based Crowdfunding

With the remarkable development of information and internet technology,innovations about financing are emerging in an endless stream.As one of the innovations,crowdfunding has become the most important way for small and medium enterprises or star-ups to overcome the financing difficulty.Crowdfunding allows entrepreneurs to raise funding through an open call in the crowdfunding platform.Moreover,ordinary people get more and more investment opportunities because of the new fund raising method.It's beneficial to optimize the allocation of funding.Crowdfunding has been developing rapidly home and broad,while in our country,it's still a new thing.In China,we are still exploring the new model,and the relative laws or platforms are not mature yet.Academic research on the subject is increasing in number.However,most of them are empirical research based on data from crowdfunding websites.There's little research understanding the financing process through mathematical analysis.Therefore;in this paper,I aim to find out the optimal reward scheme for the entrepreneur.To do this,I model the utility and payoff functions of the entrepreneur,investors and the platform.In the extension of the base model,I try to analyze the threshold effect and explore how it may influence the optimal choice of different entities.Furthermore,the personal reward in the utility function of investors is revised to find new insights.The research may serve as theoretical basis for the relative entities when making funding or investing decisions.The results indicate that:(?)The entities involved in the process of crowdfunding,that is the entrepreneur,the investors and the platform,they have common goals during the process.As their utilities will increase as more and more people participate,they tend to allure more investors.(2)Because of the threshold mechanism,the optimal investment may not accumulate the target fund.In this case,the investor would increase their investment,so that the project can get funded in the end of the crowdfunding.(3)When deciding the optimal reward scheme,the entrepreneur should take the target funding amount,number of potential investors and the base value of the project into consideration.All these factors have an influence on the payoff.(4)When the personal reward to the investor is in proportion the square of their investment,they tend to increase the investment to get the maximum utility;meanwhile,the entrepreneur can gain more.At the end of the paper,some practical suggestions are put forward according to the analysis result.