Patient-generated online reviews are well-established as an important source of information for people to evaluate doctors' quality and improve health outcomes. However, how such reviews are generated in the first place is not well examined. This study examines a hitherto unexplored social driver of online review generation-doctors' presence on online health platforms, which results in the reviewers (i.e., patients) and the reviewees (i.e., doctors) coexisting in the same medium. Drawing on the Stimulus-Organism-Response theory as an overarching framework, we advance hypotheses about the impact of doctors' presence on their patients' review behaviors, including review volume, review effort, and emotional expression. To achieve causal identification, we conduct a quasi-experiment on a large online health platform and employ propensity score matching and difference-in-difference estimation. Our findings show that doctors' presence increases their patients' review volume. Furthermore, doctors' presence motivates their patients to exert greater effort and express more positive emotions in the review text. The results also show that the presence of doctors with higher professional titles has a stronger effect on review volume than the presence of doctors with lower professional titles. Our findings offer important implications both for research and practice.
Though recent research demonstrates the impact of patient generated content on patient outcomes and doctor performance, we still have a limited understanding about how patient content is generated in the first place. In this research, we examine how patients' self-awareness of being observed by their own doctors in online healthcare platform influences patient generated content, including how much they generate and what they generate. Focusing on a leading online healthcare platform, we construct a panel dataset of patient generated content for a matched set of doctors. We find that patients' selfawareness of being observed can increase the quantity of patient generated content. Specially, "being observed" leads to more subjective content, while it has no relationship with objective content. Our results also demonstrate that the mechanism of "being observed" benefits the review quantity at the cost of review quality. We also discuss contributions to user generated content and online healthcare.
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