When Beauty Overshadows Expertise: Beauty Bias on Online Professional Platforms

Abstract

Despite the well-documented preference for beauty across various domains, its ethical implications in professional contexts, where expertise is central, remain largely unexplored. This paper addresses this gap by examining beauty bias on online professional platforms, investigating how provider appearance influences performance, as reflected in consumers’ order quantity. We compare two relevant yet distinct contexts: the cosmetic platform, which provides appearance-relevant healthcare services to beauty-seeking consumers, and the traditional healthcare platform, which primarily serves patients seeking medical treatment. Advancing the match-up hypothesis, we propose that beauty bias emerges only when three factors align: providers’ appearance, the nature of the provided services, and consumers’ beauty-seeking intentions. To empirically test our hypotheses, we conducted two observational-data analyses (Study 1 and Study 2) to examine beauty bias across different professional platforms, followed by an online experiment (Study 3) to isolate the effects of platform type and consumer intentions. Our findings reveal that while a match between provider appearance and service image enhances performance, this match alone is not sufficient—beauty bias is activated only by highly beauty-seeking consumers. This explains why beauty-driven performance advantages are observed on cosmetic platforms but not on traditional healthcare platforms. Additionally, we investigate how beauty bias interacts with doctors’ gender and experience disclosures. This study advances the theoretical understanding of match-up hypothesis in a professional context, highlights ethical concerns regarding appearance-based judgments, and offers actionable insights for mitigating beauty bias in expert-driven fields.

Keywords: beauty bias, professional service, match-up hypothesis, source credibility theory