What Makes a Helpful Online Review for Healthcare Services? An Empirical Analysis of Haodaifu Website

Ya Gao and Ling Ma ()
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Ya Gao: East China University of Science and Technology
Ling Ma: East China University of Science and Technology

A chapter in Smart Service Systems, Operations Management, and Analytics, 2020, pp 365-378 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The online healthcare websites bring more healthcare resources to patients, reduce time cost, and break geographical restrictions. However, the information explosion brought by the healthcare website also increased the difficulty in information screening and trust establishment for risky healthcare serviceHealthcare service . The online review is an important resolution for information asymmetry. This paper explores the review significance of healthcare websites by examining the impact of review depthReview depth and valence on the review helpfulnessReview helpfulness , especially in the context of different risk level diseases. We employed a secondary data econometric analysis obtained as 44,938 pieces of reviews from Haodaifu.com . We found that both review depth and valence have a significant impact on review helpfulness. And review depth has a more significant impact when review valence is low. But the disease risk moderates the impact, that is, review depthReview depth is more useful for low-risk diseases than high-risk diseases. Also, the disease risk moderates the impact of review valenceReview valence . For low-risk diseases, neutral reviews have a more positive impact on the review helpfulnessReview helpfulness . For high-risk diseases, extreme reviews have a greater impact on the review helpfulness. These findings can help to understand users’ needs on healthcare websites and establish more effective ways to do communication.

Keywords: Review depth; Review valence; Review helpfulness; Healthcare service (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-030-30967-1_33

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-30967-1_33

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