Bundling and Pricing Strategies in Crowdfunding

ABSTRACT As an effective financing tool, crowdfunding helps entrepreneurs raise funds from the crowd and start innovative projects. Creators must carefully choose the mechanism and pricing strategy to maximize expected profit. When promoting multiple products, they shall decide whether to run a single bundled campaign (bundle funding) or two separate campaigns, each focusing on one product (separate funding). A two‐period model has been used to compare two mechanisms and several pricing policies for all‐or‐nothing (AoN) reward‐based crowdfunding campaigns. Separate funding leverages the advantage of spreading risk among multiple projects, especially if the distribution of backers' valuations is skewed. The bundling strategy can capture a more significant return if the fractions of different backers are balanced. However, in crowdfunding, creators often offer multiple price options to match different buyer preferences and boost the success rate. The menu pricing strategy of separate funding achieves a higher expected profit than bundle funding in significant parameter subspaces by spreading the risk and stimulating each project's pledging. For asymmetric bundling, separate funding may not be optimal if product heterogeneity is high. However, if the firm can adopt different pricing strategies for different products in separate funding, separate funding weakly dominates bundle funding. This study compares social welfare across different mechanisms and pricing strategies, explores the impact of complements and substitutes, and incorporates intertemporal pricing to reinforce the robustness of the findings.