Designing Reward-based Crowdfunding Campaign Under Participators’ Behaviors And Information Asymmetry

In 2021,the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology,in conjunction with the National Development and Reform Commission and other 19 departments,issued the "14th Five-Year Plan" to promote the development of small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs).It pointed out that in the "14th Five-year Plan" period,facing the complex and severe internal and external environment,small and medium-sized enterprises shoulder more new missions.In order to fulfill the important role of SMEs in promoting employment and innovation,and to promote their high-quality development,it is necessary to further alleviate the financing problems of SMEs.As a new financing method in the context of the development of the Internet,crowdfunding not only solves the financing difficulties of SMEs in the early stage of development,but also plays an important role in marketing,predicting market demand and stimulating creativity.However,the current development of crowd-funding is not sound,especially the widespread problem of asymmetric product quality information,which will not only damage the interests of consumers,but also seriously hinder the healthy development of crowd-funding.Therefore,it is a research hot point to design crowdfunding parameters(price and goal)to mitigate information asymmetry between creators and backers.Existing literatures often use crowdfunding parameters(price and target)as quality signals to alleviate information asymmetry through signal transmission.However,quality information beyond crowdfunding parameters(such as product videos and development experiences)and the corresponding participant behaviors have not been included in the research.In the light of this,based on asymmetric information background,this paper constructs a two-stage dynamic game model between the initiator and the consumer to study the optimal design of crowdfunding parameter and the corresponding profit maximization under different participant behaviors(initiator information disclosure and consumer information acquisition).This paper tries to find the substitution relationship among signal transmission,initiator information disclosure and consumer information acquisition,and studies the influence of this substitution relationship on the optimal design of crowdfunding parameters and equilibrium profits.Rusults Reveal the information interaction of participants and the potential interaction mechanism.These futher provide theoretical guidance for alleviating the market quality information asymmetry of crowdfunding and promoting its healthy development.Some results are yielded.First,when the perceived quality is low,the crowdfunding parameter is an effective signal for the initiator to convey quality information to consumers,including three ways: raising the target of crowdfunding,lowering the price of crowdfunding,or changing both.Second,With the increase of perceived quality,the way of relying only on crowdfunding parameters to transmit signals has the disadvantage of too high signal cost.At this point,incorporating participants’ behaviors into the design of crowdfunding parameters can make up for this deficiency.Third,Comparing the equilibrium profits of the above different parameter designs,found that there exists a substitution relationship.In particular,the cost advantage of initiator’s information disclosure behavior is more prominent than that of consumer’s information acquisition behavior under certain conditions,and this advantage becomes more obvious with the reduction of information disclosure cost and the increase of potential market capacity.