Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Oct 7, 2019
Date Accepted: Jan 24, 2020
Why consumers voluntarily reward free health services in online health communities? An empirical investigation
ABSTRACT
Background:
Rewarding health knowledge and service contributors with money is crucial for the sustainable provision of health knowledge and health services in online health communities (OHCs); however, the reasons of why consumers voluntarily reward these free health knowledge and services are still under-investigated.
Objective:
This study aims to address the above gap by exploring the factors influencing consumers’ voluntary rewarding behaviors on free health services in OHCs.
Methods:
Based on prior studies and cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST), we incorporate two health service content-related variables (i.e., informational support and emotional support) and two interpersonal factors (i.e., social norm compliance and social interaction), and build a proposed model. We crawl a dataset from an Chinese OHC for mental health, code them and extract nine variables, and test the model with a negative binomial model.
Results:
The data sample includes 2,148 health-related questions and 12,133 answers. The empirical results indicate that the effects of informational support (β = .168, P < .001), emotional support (β = .463, P < .001), social norm compliance (β = .510, P < .001), and social interaction (β = .281, P < .001) are significant. The moderating effects of social interaction on informational support (β = .032, P = .02) and emotional support (β = -.086, P < .001) are significant. The moderating effect of social interaction on social norm compliance (β = .014, P = .38) is insignificant.
Conclusions:
Informational support, emotional support, social norm compliance, and social interaction promote consumers to voluntarily reward free online health services. Social interaction enhances the effect of informational support but weakens the effect of emotional support. This study contributes to the literature on knowledge sharing in OHCs by exploring the factors influencing consumers’ voluntary rewarding behaviors on free online health services and contributes to CEST literature by verifying that the effects of experiential and rational systems on individual behaviors can vary while external factors change.
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