Prosocial behaviors and economic performance: Evidence from an online mental healthcare platform

Abstract

With the growth of online mental healthcare platforms, health professionals have been providing online consultation services during their spare time. However, little is known about the prosocial behaviors of health professionals on these platforms and their effect on professionals’ economic performance. In this research, we aim to identify and quantify the main effect of prosocial behaviors (i.e., offering free services) on future economic performance and the potential mediation effects of relationship capital and reputation capital in an online mental healthcare platform. Based on signaling and commitment theories, we use a panel dataset from a Chinese online mental healthcare platform to test our hypotheses. Our findings show that a mental health professional's previous prosocial behavior has a positive impact on economic performance and that this effect may manifest through the relationship capital pathway. However, reputation capital generated from prosocial behaviors does not significantly mediate the impact of prosocial behavior on economic performance. Our research provides important implications for healthcare operations concerning service offerings and healthcare providers’ performance on online mental healthcare platforms.

Impact of credit default swaps on firms’ operational efficiency

“…To further explore how CDS trading increases firms’ operational efficiency, for example, in our theory and hypotheses, supply chain financing and corporate monitoring can be two possible mediating factors through which the firms’ operational efficiency is improved when CDSs are present. Accordingly, we further examine the mediating effects of trade credit on supply chain finance and institutional ownership on corporate monitoring by utilizing the Sobel test (Ding et al., 2021; MacKinnon et al., 2000; Sobel, 1982, 1987; Yan et al., 2022). The regression models of the mediation tests are as follows: $$\begin{align} \left\{ \def\eqcellsep{&}\begin{array}{l} {Trade\ Credi{t}_{i,t+1}\left(\mathrm{Or}\ Institutional\ Ownershi{p}_{i,t}\right)}\\[3pt] {\quad ={\alpha}_{0}+{\beta}_{1}CD{S}_{i,t}+{a}_{i}\ Control{...$$…”

“…To further explore how CDS trading increases firms’ operational efficiency, for example, in our theory and hypotheses, supply chain financing and corporate monitoring can be two possible mediating factors through which the firms’ operational efficiency is improved when CDSs are present. Accordingly, we further examine the mediating effects of trade credit on supply chain finance and institutional ownership on corporate monitoring by utilizing the Sobel test (Ding et al., 2021; MacKinnon et al., 2000; Sobel, 1982,1987; Yan et al., 2022). The regression models of the mediation tests are as follows: where captures the total mediation effect (indirect effect), and δ 1 captures the direct effect of CDS trading on operational efficiency.…”

Influence of Free Consultation Services on Patients' Willingness to Pay in Online Medical Platforms

“…As such, information accuracy is an important influencing factor for patients to build trust in doctors. In addition, too much useless information will cause difficulty for online platform users to screen information, thus reducing their satisfaction [2,41] . Therefore, doctors must provide patients with sufficient information related to their diseases.…”

What makes helpful online mental health information? Empirical evidence on the effects of information quality and responders’ effort

“…For instance, online health communities (OHCs) such as Patientslikeme and Haodf.com , are virtual community for health and medical information generation and transmission, which allow online communication, emotional support and mutual assistance, with doctors, nurses, patients, and their families as the main service objects ( Yan and Tan, 2014 ; Zhou, 2018 ). Some online health communities are used to support mental health (online mental health communities, OMHCs) and recently has increasingly become important platforms for mental health information seeking and sharing ( Liu et al, 2020 ; Qianqian Ben et al, 2020 ; Yan et al, forthcoming ; Zhou et al, forthcoming ). The participation of patients in mental online health services can promote the information as well as emotional support among those peers ( Zhou, 2018 ), so as to improve their health status and enhance their self-health management ( Yan and Tan, 2014 ; Chen et al, 2019 ).…”

“…Although the popularity of OMHCs provides a convenient channel for patients to access services, the complexity of mental illness and treatment methods, people’s low level of mental health literacy, the inherent expertise of health information and knowledge make the information asymmetry ( Yan et al, forthcoming ), results in higher requirements for identification of pedestrian users ( Diviani et al, 2015 ). In order to reduce search costs of help-seekers without adequate health literacy, and help them identify high-quality information, some affordance features concerning helpfulness evaluation have been adopted by OHCs, such as voting systems (e.g., “thumb” and “virtual gift”), recommendation systems, and electronic word of mouth (eWOM; Guo et al, 2017 ).…”