Is my doctor around me? Investigating the impact of doctors’ presence on patients’ review behaviors on an online health platform

Patient-generated online reviews are well-established as an important source of information for people to evaluate doctors' quality and improve health outcomes. However, how such reviews are generated in the first place is not well examined. This study examines a hitherto unexplored social driver of online review generation—doctors' presence on online health platforms, which results in the reviewers (i.e., patients) and the reviewees (i.e., doctors) coexisting in the same medium. Drawing on the Stimulus-Organism-Response theory as an overarching framework, we advance hypotheses about the impact of doctors' presence on their patients' review behaviors, including review volume, review effort, and emotional expression. To achieve causal identification, we conduct a quasi-experiment on a large online health platform and employ propensity score matching and difference-in-difference estimation. Our findings show that doctors' presence increases their patients' review volume. Furthermore, doctors' presence motivates their patients to exert greater effort and express more positive emotions in the review text. The results also show that the presence of doctors with higher professional titles has a stronger effect on review volume than the presence of doctors with lower professional titles. Our findings offer important implications both for research and practice.