Quid Pro Quo in Online Medical Consultation? Investigating the Effects of Small Monetary Gifts from Patients

Forthcoming at Production and Operations Management

34 Pages Posted: 10 Jul 2020 Last revised: 13 Dec 2021

See all articles by Wei Zhao

Wei Zhao

Harbin Institute of Technology

Ben Liu

City University of Hong Kong (CityU)

Xitong Guo

Harbin Institute of Technology

Tianshi Wu

Harbin Institute of Technology

Subodha Kumar

Temple University - Fox School of Business

Date Written: November 30, 2021

Abstract

Recent years have seen robust growth in online medical consultation platforms. These platforms allow patients to access various healthcare services provided by doctors (e.g., health assessment, diagnosis, consultation, and supervision). In China, many such platforms allow patients to give small monetary gifts to doctors as an expression of gratitude. The implicit assumption is that expensive gifts influence doctors' medical service and generate conflicts of interest but small gifts do not. However, there is little empirical evidence to support this assumption. In order to fill this gap in the literature, our study investigates whether small gifts from patients impact the quality of service provided to the gift-givers (i.e., direct effect) and to the non-givers (i.e., spillover effect). We examine three aspects of online medical service quality: (i) patient wait time, (ii) the amount of information in doctors' responses, and (iii) the degree of emotional support in doctors' responses. We find that despite the gifts' negligible monetary value, doctors who receive gifts do reciprocate to the gift-givers by providing them with more timely responses and greater emotional support. Furthermore, after receiving the small gifts, doctors may be slower in responding to non-givers and offer them less emotional support. We also investigate whether these effects (both direct and spillover effects) vary with doctors' backgrounds, including their professional experience and geographic location. Our findings have both theoretical and practical implications for patients, online medical consultation platforms, and healthcare policy makers.

Keywords: online medical consultation, gifts from patients, spillover effect, healthcare industry, fuzzy regression discontinuity design.

Suggested Citation

Zhao, Wei and Liu, Ben and Guo, Xitong and Wu, Tianshi and Kumar, Subodha, Quid Pro Quo in Online Medical Consultation? Investigating the Effects of Small Monetary Gifts from Patients (November 30, 2021). Forthcoming at Production and Operations Management, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3629200

Wei Zhao

Harbin Institute of Technology ( email )

Harbin, Heilongjiang 150080
China

Ben Liu

City University of Hong Kong (CityU) ( email )

83 Tat Chee Avenue
Kowloon
Hong Kong

Xitong Guo (Contact Author)

Harbin Institute of Technology ( email )

huanghe road
harbin, heilongjiang 150001
China

Tianshi Wu

Harbin Institute of Technology ( email )

92 West Dazhi Street
Nan Gang District
Harbin, heilongjiang 150001
China

Subodha Kumar

Temple University - Fox School of Business ( email )

Philadelphia, PA 19122-____
United States

HOME PAGE: http://sites.temple.edu/subodha/

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