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Abstract
To attract more patients and improve the quality of health services, online health communities (OHCs) have launched a bundling feature that provides patients with a package of two or more existing health services for a discounted price. Existing bundling research has mostly focused on traditional industries, whereas bundled services in the field of professional health and their effects are usually neglected. Therefore, this study investigates the effects of bundling strategy on doctors’ online returns in OHCs. We focus on the effects of the launch of bundled services on separate components (doctors’ economic return) and online reputation (social return) and study the moderating effects of doctors’ characteristics on these returns. Based on analyses using a difference-in-difference model, we find that the launch of bundled services can positively affect doctors’ online reputation and part of separate components. A doctor’s tenure also moderates the effects of bundled services on doctors’ returns. Our study provides several theoretical implications for researchers and practical contributions for OHCs administrators.
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Data Availability
The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to the fact that they constitute and excerpt of research in progress but are available from the authors on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No: 72072011, 71872013, 72110107003) and Beijing Municipal Social Science Foundation (Grant No: 18JDGLB040).
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School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, No. 5 Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian District, Beijing, 100081, China
Qiuju Yin, Chenxi Guo, Cen He & Zhijun Yan
Sustainable Development Research Institute for Economy and Society of Beijing, Beijing, 100081, China
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Appendices
Appendix A
We expand the study from hypertension to a broader range of diseases, including 1,259 diseases (e.g., coronary heart disease, cerebral infarction, and depression). As the observation period of our study is from April 2016 to April 2017, we chose doctors who have registered in the OHCs before April 2016 as our samples. Then, we eliminated doctors with less than four-period activities in the data set, until we finally have 630 doctors in the treatment group (Sun et al.,2020). We re-estimated our DID model using the new data sample. The results are presented in Table13 and are consistent with those obtained for hypertension.
Appendix B
Table14
Appendix C
Table15
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Yin, Q., Guo, C., He, C.et al. Effect of New Bundled Services on Doctors’ Online Social and Economic Returns: Evidence from an Online Health Community.Inf Syst Front25, 2393–2416 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-022-10362-6
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