The Impact Of Physicians’ Prosocial Behavior On Online Performance In Online Healthcare Community

With the development of information technology,online healthcare community has gradually become a new channel to solve the shortage of medical resources.Physicians,as providers of medical services and information in the community,play an important role in the community.Scholars have studied various factors affecting physicians’ online performance in order to attract more physicians to join the community and make the community develop continuously.However,the impact of physicians’ prosocial behavior on online performance has not been verified.In the field of corporate management,prosocial behavior is widely studied and considered as an important factor affecting corporate performance.However,it was difficult to obtain information about physicians’ prosocial behavior from traditional channels in the past,which led to the lack of research on the impact of physicians’ prosocial behavior.In this context,this paper explores the impact of physicians’ prosocial behavior on online performance with the help of abundant data provided by online healthcare community,which can not only fill the gap of existing research,but also provide some suggestions for encouraging physicians to participate in prosocial activities.This paper mainly studies the relationship between physicians’ prosocial behavior and performance in online healthcare community,and whether this relationship will change for physicians with different levels of evaluation.Specifically,this paper studies three issues: 1)Does the participation of physicians’ prosocial activities improve physicians’ online performance in online healthcare communities? 2)For physicians with different online word-of-mouth,is there heterogeneity in the relationship between physicians’ prosocial behavior and performance? 3)Is there heterogeneity in the relationship between physicians’ prosocial behavior and performance for physicians with different professional titles? In order to answer these questions,based on information asymmetry theory and cognitive miser theory,this paper puts forward hypotheses under the framework of opportunity-motivation-ability(OMA)theory;we crawl data of more than 6,000 hypertension physicians from the online healthcare community and analyze the data by the econometric model of spline regression subsequently.In order to ensure the reliability of data analysis results,this paper uses a variety of regression methods for robustness test and we also validate our analysis results on the sample of hepatitis B physicians to ensure the robustness of the findings.As for the potential endogeneity problems that may lead to regression bias,this paper uses the method of propensity score matching and difference-in-difference to test the regression results.The results of data analysis show that prosocial behavior can improve physicians’ online performance only when the strength of prosocial behavior is below the tipping point.In addition,the influence of prosocial behavior is heterogeneous for physicians with different online word-of-mouth and professional titles.For physicians with higher word-of-mouth,this effect of prosocial behaviors still exists,but it does not improve the performance of physicians with lower word-of-mouth;for physicians with lower professional titles,focusing on the quality of prosocial behavior is more conducive to performance improvement while for physicians with higher professional titles,increasing the number of prosocial behaviors would be more conducive.The research results not only clarify the relationship between prosocial behavior and online performance of physicians in online healthcare communities,but also introduce prosocial behavior research into online healthcare communities,broadening the research field of prosocial behavior,which has certain theoretical contribution.What’s more,this paper encourages more physicians to participate in prosocial activities and puts forward specific suggestions for physicians with different word-of-mouth and professional titles to help them carry out prosocial activities more effectively,which has certain practical significance.