Abstract:
With the rapid development of the crowdsourcing market, the platform pricing mechanism has become key to its activity and profitability. This paper focuses on crowdsourcing platforms’ access payment mechanism for contractors, constructing three models: pay-per-use, membership and hybrid pricing, and analyzing the impact of matching efficiency, task reward, commission ratio and prepayment risk coefficient on optimal pricing, contractors’ optimal effort level and platform optimal profit. The research shows that optimal pricing increases with higher matching efficiency and task reward but decreases with a higher commission ratio. In membership and hybrid pricing models, optimal pricing declines with higher prepayment risk coefficient, and is more sensitive to changes in commission ratio and prepayment risk under supply constraints than demand constraints. The contractor’s optimal effort increases with matching efficiency and task reward; it increases with the commission rate under pay-per-use pricing, but first rises and then falls under membership and hybrid pricing; it increases with prepayment risk under membership pricing, but first rises and then falls under hybrid pricing. Model comparison indicates the hybrid model yields the highest profit; the pay-per-use model outperforms the membership model when commission ratio is low and prepayment risk is high, and vice versa. For supply-side incentives, the same condition makes membership and hybrid models’ effort level higher than pay-per-use, and vice versa, with the membership model always outperforming the hybrid one. Thus, crowdsourcing platforms should dynamically adjust pricing to balance revenue growth and participation incentives.