Physicians' Online Popularity and Price Premiums for Online Health Consultations: A Combined Signaling Theory and Online Feedback Mechanisms Explanation Submission Type: Research-in -Prog ress

摘要

Online health consultation communities (OHCCs) provide a digital channel for physicians to signal their professional competence (i.e., credibility) and compassionate care (i.e., benevolence), and for patients to spread word-of-mouth reviews. The valence, volume, and variance of patient reviews may shape the effectiveness of signals transmitted by physicians in OHCCs. We investigate the interactions between the signaling mechanism and the online feedback mechanism through which OHCCs help physicians build online popularity and achieve price premiums for online health consultations. We are using web scraping to collect weekly data for 12 months from a large OHCC in China. Applying mixed effects models on the data collected to date, we find online popularity and price premiums to be two benefits that physicians can derive from OHCCs. Importantly, in the presence of benevolence actions, an absence of consistently favorable online feedback slows down physicians' online popularity and reduces price premiums for online health consultations.