Currently submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 22, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 27, 2024 - May 22, 2024
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Spillover effects of paid functions on doctors’ unpaid knowledge activities: Evidence from Haodf online platform
ABSTRACT
Background:
Providing incentives for doctors' knowledge contributions in online medical communities is crucial for both doctors and patients. For doctors, offering channels to monetize their knowledge enhances their earnings from online contributions, increasing their willingness and efficiency in sharing knowledge. For patients, the existence of paid knowledge complements their access to information, providing higher-quality and more specialized medical knowledge.
Objective:
This article examines how the introduction of monetary incentives in online medical communities affects doctors’ unpaid knowledge activities in the community.
Methods:
This article uses the website of Haodf online platform as the data source, that introduces paid scenarios for its science popularizing function which can bring economic benefits to doctors. A total of 7453 doctors who participated in the knowledge contribution of the website were collected including their paid and unpaid knowledge activities. Then this article studies the impact of participation in paid knowledge activities on doctors' free knowledge contributions, including knowledge quantity, quality, and diversity dimensions. Considering the inconsistent participation time of doctors in paid knowledge activities, this article combines the propensity score matching method and the multi-period difference-in-differences method.
Results:
This study found that participation in paid knowledge activities has a positive spillover effect on doctors' free knowledge contributions, which is manifested in the increase of post quantity, article length, function word frequency, causal word frequency, and content information entropy. The paid function leads to a decrease in the consistency of title content.
Conclusions:
The research conclusions of this article complement the relevant literature on the role of economic incentives in the medical context. The findings of this article help the platform understand the important role of monetary incentives on doctors' content contributions, thus promoting the long-term development of content.
Citation
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Copyright
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