Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 12, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: May 15, 2019 - Jun 6, 2019
Date Accepted: Jun 27, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
The Impact of Monetary Incentives on Physicians’ Prosocial Behaviors: Evidence from China
ABSTRACT
Background:
In online medical-consulting platforms, physicians can get both economic returns and social returns by offering online medical service such as answering questions and sharing healthcare knowledge with patients. The online prosocial behavior of physicians could bring many benefits to healthcare industry. Meanwhile, monetary incentives can encourage physicians to make more engagements in the online medical communities. However, little research has studied the impact of monetary incentives on physicians’ prosocial behaviors and its heterogeneity.
Objective:
This study aims to explore the effects of monetary incentives on physicians’ prosocial behaviors as well as to investigate the moderation effects of self- and others’ cognition of physicians’ competence.
Methods:
A fixed-effect specification-regression model based on a difference-in-difference (DID) design with robust standard errors clustered at the physician level using monthly panel data, including 26,543 physicians in 3,851 hospitals in 133 months (Nov. 2006–Dec. 2017) from a leading online healthcare platform in China.
Results:
The results of this study show that the introduction of monetary incentives has a positive effect on physicians’ prosocial behavior. In addition, this effect is enhanced for physicians with high level of self- and others’ competence recognition.
Conclusions:
Our study investigates physician’s online prosocial behavior through self-determination theory embedded in online healthcare platforms. We provide evidence on the effect of monetary incentives on physicians’ prosocial behaviors in the telemedicine markets and provide insight for relevant stakeholders into how to design an effective incentive mechanism to improve physicians’ prosocial engagements.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.