Optimising deferred payment mechanisms in reward crowdfunding: a Stackelberg game with product delivery risk

Reward crowdfunding products may have quality risk issues due to their innovation. Some platforms aim to reduce these quality risk issues through deferred payments, but their adoption also poses risks for creators, such as being unable to complete all production tasks due to limited start-up capital. This paper sorts out three specific mechanisms for deferred payments in reward crowdfunding, explores the optimal decisions of creators and platforms before and after the third-party regulation, and analyses the optimal applicability and adoption probability of these three mechanisms. This paper indicates that lowering either market size or consumers’ perceived level of product quality enhances the expected profits of creators. Each mechanism has optimal applicability, and operations strategy oriented platforms should choose Mechanisms TBA (Taobao Post-adjustment), TBB (Taobao Pre-adjustment), and FPM (Prior Study-proposed) in the start-up stage, regulatory transition stage, and maturity stage, respectively. The third-party regulatory intervention is detrimental to creators who have a high probability of completing all production tasks, leading to profits that are below pre-intervention levels. Finally, we extend our research by incorporating the product menu strategy, integrating the two-stage strategy, introducing cultural hotspots, and considering the heterogeneity of consumers’ perceived level of product quality.