The Impact Of Prosocial Behavior Diversity On Physicians’ Online Economic Returns

With the development of information technology,online health communities emerged and gradually prospered which effectively alleviated the problem of the shortage of medical resources and inadequate communication between doctors and patients.However,due to the information asymmetry in the medical process,patients are facing high uncertainty when making medical decisions.Besides,due to the Matthew effect,many experienced doctors,especially those who have just entered the online consultation platform,cannot be known by patients immediately,and attracting first customers is an important step for doctors to give online consultations.Doctors’ prosocial behavior provides a certain way of tackling with this problem.The online health communities have huge market potential and have already attracted the attention of many scholars.The scholars have studied a lot about how to improve doctors’ online economic returns.However,few studies focused on doctors’ prosocial behaviors,and yet no reports on doctors’ prosocial behavior research on behavior categories.As the reality shows that doctors can participate in many types of prosocial behaviors in online health communities,this study selects the two most widely participated prosocial behaviors by doctors.According to their manifestations,they are divided into non-interactive prosocial behaviors and interactive prosocial behaviors.This paper reveals the mechanism of the influence of different types of prosocial behaviors on doctors’ online economic returns.The main research questions are as follows: 1)Whether doctors’ non-interactive prosocial behaviors and interactive prosocial behaviors in online health communities have an impact on online economic returns;2)Whether there is a difference in doctors’ non-interactive prosocial behaviors and interactive prosocial behaviors in online health communities,and whether there is an interaction mechanism between them;3)Whether there is heterogeneity in the influence of different types of prosocial behaviors on online economic returns of doctors at different levels of communication details.Combining information asymmetry and free value-added strategies,this paper constructs the theoretical model and proposes research hypotheses.The panel data of hepatitis B doctors are collected on the Haodaifu online website,and the fixed effects regression method is used for regression analysis,and the robustness of the research is tested.The results of the study show that both non-interactive prosocial behaviors and interactive prosocial behaviors have a significant positive impact on doctors’ online economic returns.Among them,in the quantitative dimension,the impact of interactive prosocial behavior on online economic returns is higher than that of non-interactive prosocial behavior;in terms of quality,the difference between the two is not obvious.The interaction between non-interactive prosocial behavior and interactive prosocial behavior is significantly positive for online economic returns,and the two have mutually reinforcing effects.For doctors,the more detailed the communication,the positive impact of the number of interactive prosocial behaviors on online economic returns will be weakened,and the impact of the quality of interactive prosocial behaviors on online economic returns will be enhanced.The above results are consistent under different disease severity.The research results reveal the influence mechanism of different types of prosocial behaviors on doctors’ online economic returns,and explore the heterogeneity of the influence to doctors with different levels of communication details.In theory,it fills up the gaps in the research on prosocial behavior categories in the online medical field.In practice,it provides targeted management suggestions for platform managers and doctors to promote the healthy and orderly development of online medical care.