PurposeThe significance of physician-user interaction has been widely acknowledged in offline and online healthcare consultation. However, limited attempts have been made to explore the influence of physician-user interaction on users' perceived service quality (PSQ) in the mobile context. Based on the literature on physician-user interaction and media synchronicity theory, this study proposes a theoretical model where the interactive factors common across the offline, online and mobile context, i.e. physicians' informational support and emotional support, the interactive factors unique in the mobile context, i.e. physicians' response speed and voice service, and the interaction between the two categories of interactive factors predict users' PSQ in mobile consultation.Design/methodology/approachThis study collects consultation records between 25,225 users and 738 physicians from a leading Chinese mobile consultation application, and employs linear regression to verify the proposed theoretical model.FindingsPhysicians' informational, emotional support, response speed and voice service are found to have significant positive impacts on users' PSQ. Besides, physicians' response speed strengthens the positive impacts of physicians' informational and emotional support on users' PSQ, while physicians' voice service weakens the positive link between physicians' informational support on users' PSQ.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the antecedents for users' PSQ in mobile consultation by identifying unique interactive factors in the mobile context, and highlighting the individual and interaction effects of different physician-user interactive factors. Besides, this study employs novel methods, which leverages text classification and text pattern recognition to more accurately depict physicians' online behaviors based on objective communication records.

Purpose Uncertain level discount (ULD) is a type of promotion combining regular discount (RD) with uncertainty. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of ULD on consumers’ perceived quality compared with RD and to identify the relevant influencing mechanism and boundary for the effectiveness of ULD. Design/methodology/approach Three online experiments were conducted with 445 participants from China. First, experiment 1 compares the attractiveness of ULD and RD. Second, experiment 2 evaluates the impacts of ULD and RD on consumers’ perceived quality and clarifies the mechanism in this process. Finally, experiment 3 examines the moderating effect of product knowledge. Findings ULD has the same level of attractiveness as RD with equivalent expected discount value for consumers. Besides, consumers in ULD give higher ratings to product quality compared with those in RD, and the lower diagnosticity of price cues in ULD underlies the differential effects of ULD vs RD. Furthermore, product knowledge moderates the relationship between the two promotions and perceived quality. Practical implications The findings provide valuable guidance for managers to conduct promotional campaigns. ULD is an effective promotion to attract consumers to purchase with keeping consumers’ perceived quality high, and such effectiveness will rise for products that consumers are unfamiliar with. Managers can make rational use of ULD to achieve positive promotion results in both the short and long term. Originality/value Few studies pay attention to the long-term effects of the uncertain promotion. This research profoundly investigates the impact of ULD on perceived quality, which complements existing studies from a more integrated perspective that combines short- and long-term effects. Also, this research identifies the mechanism based on the cue diagnosticity theory and puts forward a new explanation for positive uncertainty in uncertain promotions. Finally, this research applies the impact of product knowledge on information process strategies into the uncertain promotion, which clarifies the utility boundary of ULD from a new perspective and offers a more comprehensive understanding for this promotion.

This study aims to understand the underlying reasons for poor doctor-patient relationships (DPR). While extant studies on antecedents of poor DPR mainly focus on the offline context and often adopt the patients' perspective, this work focuses on the mobile context and take both doctors' and mobile consultation users' perspectives into consideration. To fulfill this purpose, we first construct a theoretical framework based on the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) literature. Then we coded 592 doctor-user communication records to validate and elaborate the proposed theoretical model. This work reveals that characteristics of mobile technologies pose potential challenges on both doctors' and patients' information providing, informative interpreting, and relationship maintaining behaviors, resulting in 10 and 6 types of inappropriate behaviors of doctors and users, respectively, that trigger poor DPR in the mobile context. The findings enrich the research on online DPR and provide insights for improving DPR in the mobile context. Extant research on mobile healthcare service is emerging, but studies that aim at uncovering the underlying reasons for poor DPRs in the mobile context are still lacking. The majority of previous research tends to focus on the positive experience brought about by mobile healthcare services, such as user satisfaction [10] and the adoption or continuous usage of mobile technology [3,11]. However, the experience of dissatisfied participants is largely ignored. The negative experience is also worth noting because understanding the complaints guide practitioners to improve service quality [8]. Although a few studies have paid attention to the dissatisfying experience of mobile healthcare services, they tend to interpret the experience only from the perspective of users [8,12]. While these studies are insightful, a single perspective from users is not adequate, because they missed the perception of doctors which is considered quite different from that of users [13,14].These two literature gaps (namely lacking studies on dissatisfying experience of mobile healthcare services and lacking dual perspectives from both users and doctors) might partly be attributed to the mainstream research method in the healthcare field. Most studies rely on questionnaires and interviews to collect subjective ratings about mobile healthcare services, such as Akter et al. (2013) [15], Deng et al. (2015) [16], and Wu et al. (2018) [17]. The collected responses are usually inaccurate since respondents are rating events that happened at an earlier time. Besides, it is difficult to match responses from doctors and patients via questionnaires.This work aims to uncover the underlying reasons for poor DPR from dual perspectives of both doctors and users in mobile medical consultation service. To achieve our goals, we first reviewed the literature on Computer-Mediated Communication (hereafter, CMC) in search of theoretical accounts for the poor DPR in the mobile context. The CMC literature focuses on the influence of the fe...

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Introduction: S-ketamine plays an important role in reducing postoperative pain, but its impact on the quality of recovery in breast cancer has not been clarified. We designed this