Hsu Yuan-Teng, Chiu Ya-Ling, Wang Jying-Nan, Liu Hung-Chun
Research Center of Finance, Shanghai Business School, Shanghai, China.
College of International Business, Zhejiang Yuexiu University, Zhejiang, China.
Digit Health. 2022 Jun 5;8:20552076221106319. doi: 10.1177/20552076221106319. eCollection 2022 Jan-Dec.
In this study, we use a difference-in-difference approach to explore how physician promotion, the advancement of a physician's offline reputation, affects patient behavior toward physicians in online healthcare communities; this allows us to explore how patients interpret the signals created by physician promotion. The study sample was collected from over 140,000 physician online profiles after 25 months of continuous observation, with 280 physicians who were promoted at month 13 as the treatment group and a control group obtained by propensity score matching. Our results show that a physician's promotion causes more patients to choose that physician, makes patients willing to give more psychological rewards, and makes them tend to give that physician a higher online rating. This implies that patient behavior is susceptible to the signal of physician promotion because the quality of the physician is unlikely to have changed significantly in the short term. These findings extend prior research on reputation in online communities and have crucial implications for theory and practice.
在本研究中，我们采用双重差分法来探究医生晋升（即医生线下声誉的提升）如何影响患者在在线医疗社区中对医生的行为；这使我们能够探究患者如何解读医生晋升所产生的信号。研究样本是在连续观察25个月后从超过14万份医生在线档案中收集的，其中在第13个月晋升的280名医生作为治疗组，并通过倾向得分匹配获得一个对照组。我们的结果表明，医生的晋升会使更多患者选择该医生，使患者愿意给予更多心理奖励，并使他们倾向于给该医生更高的在线评分。这意味着患者行为容易受到医生晋升信号的影响，因为医生的质量在短期内不太可能发生显著变化。这些发现扩展了先前关于在线社区声誉的研究，对理论和实践具有至关重要的意义。
