关键词: 数字经济, 创新顾客, 激励契约, 信任度, 生产率

Abstract: With the rapid development of digital technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and block chain, digital economy has become a new engine for national economic growth. Compared with traditional economy, in the context of digital economy, knowledge sharing becomes more efficient and convenient, and the rapid development of digital technology enables customers, as enterprises’end users, to participate in the innovation process of new products (or services). Customers are no longer passive buyers, but are new types of customer groups that form a complex social network through highly interconnected interaction. Their participation behavior reflects the dynamic integration of social media technology and customers’co-creation scene. The establishment of network innovation community enables the contact between enterprises and innovative customers to be free from the restrictions of time, geographical boundaries and organizational types, and provides more convenient platforms for innovative customers to share product knowledge, exchange experience and submit ideas for improvement. At the same time, in order to stimulate the participation enthusiasm of innovative customers and obtain the creative ideas related to product innovation, more and more enterprises begin to set up corresponding incentive mechanisms for innovative customers in online communities.
Although digital economy can effectively bridge the information gap between innovative customers and enterprises, enhance the willingness and ability of enterprises to realize innovation through innovative customers, and thus reduce the uncertainty of obtaining innovative profits, there are still some problems, such as insufficient investment in innovative customers’effort level, insignificant incentive effect of remuneration, and unsatisfactory incentive effect, although most enterprises set up incentive schemes for innovative customers who participate in innovation activities in network communities. How to formulate scientific and systematic incentive contracts for innovative customers in network community has become an urgent problem for enterprises. In addition, interaction behavior of innovative customers in network community depends on trust relationship to a large extent, so trust relationship is an important psychological driving factor for knowledge sharing or participation in innovation. However, existing studies tend to treat trust relationship as an intermediate variable from an empirical perspective and explore how it can affect the degree of knowledge sharing and the innovation performance of enterprises. It is not integrated into the incentive mechanism as an important variable and the studies highlight the psychological elements of innovative customers, so that they fail to make the research conclusion more close to management practice. In addition, driven by digital technology, social media makes the way for innovative customers to obtain information resources more efficient, and thus improves the innovation efficiency of innovative customers to a certain extent in the network community innovation activities. The innovation efficiency is the productivity of innovation results and refers to productivity. Therefore, when setting incentive contracts for innovative customers in network communities, we should pay attention to the influence of the productivity and the trust degree of innovative customers.
To sum up, the incentive model of innovative customers is built from the perspective where innovation customers of online community participate in enterprise’s innovation activities under digital economy, exploring the relationship among the productivity, the trust degree of innovative customers, the type of incentive contracts and the effect of incentive mechanism. This study explores the impact of the productivity and the trust degree of innovative customers on the setting of optimal incentive contracts by model solving and analysis. In addition, the results of model analysis are verified according to simulation experiments. The results show that when productivity is low and trust degree is high, the team reward contract with peer supervision advantage will be the optimal incentive contract. When productivity is high and trust degree is high, the firm will choose to provide team reward contract. With the decrease in trust degree, the relative performance contract with commitment advantage is the optimal incentive contract. As low productivity shifts to high productivity, the relative performance contract will be the optimal incentive contract more frequently.
This study only considers the influence of the trust degree and the productivity of innovative customers on optimal incentive contracts when innovative customers are risk neutral. In future studies, the risk aversion of innovative customers can be considered to further optimize the model. In addition, the influence of innovative customers’ subjective perception on the contract, including the perception of fairness in remuneration and the perception of reciprocity among participants, can be incorporated to supplement and make a comparative analysis of the research on innovative customers’incentive, so as to make the research conclusions more universal and operable.

Key words: digital economy, innovative customers, incentive contracts, trust degree, productivity