The striking growth of online communities in recent years has sparked significant interest in understanding and quantifying benefits of participation. While research has begun to document the economic outcomes associated with online communities, quantifying the social value created in these collectives has been largely overlooked. This study proposes that online health communities create social value by addressing ruralÐurban health disparities via improved health capabilities. Using a unique data set from a rare disease community, we provide one of the first empirical studies of social value creation. Our quantitative analysis using exponential random graph models reveals patterns of social support exchanged between users and the variations in these patterns based on users' location. We find that, overall, urban users are net suppliers of social support while rural participants are net recipients, suggesting that technology-mediated online health communities are able to alleviate ruralÐurban health disparities. This study advances extant understanding of value production in online collectives, and yields implications for policy.
Consumer-generated ratings typically share an objective of illuminating the quality of a product or service for other buyers. While ratings have become ubiquitous and influential on the Internet, surprisingly little empirical research has investigated how these online assessments reflect the opinion of the population at large, especially in the domain of professional services where quality is often opaque to consumers. Building on the word-of-mouth literature, we examine the relationship between online ratings and population perceptions of physician quality. Our study builds on prior work by leveraging a unique dataset which includes direct measures of both the offline population's perception of physician quality and consumer-generated online reviews. As a result, we are able to examine how online ratings reflect patients' opinions about physician quality. In sharp contrast to the widely voiced concerns by medical practitioners, we find that physicians who are rated lower in quality by the patient population are less likely to be rated online. Although ratings provided online are positively correlated with patient population opinions, the online ratings tend to be exaggerated at the upper end of the quality spectrum. This study is the first to provide empirical evidence of the relationship between online ratings and the underlying consumer-perceived quality, and extends prior research on online word-of-mouth to the domain of professional services.
This study examines how sellers respond to changes in the design of reputation systems on eBay. Specifically, we focus on one particular strategic behavior on eBay’s reputation system: sellers’ explicit retaliation against negative feedback provided by buyers to coerce buyers into revoking their negative feedback. We examine how these strategic sellers respond to removal of their ability to retaliate against buyers. We utilize one key policy change of eBay’s reputation system, which provides a natural experimental setting that allows us to infer the causal impact of the reputation system on seller behavior. Our results show that coercing buyers to revoke their negative feedback through retaliation enables low-quality sellers to manipulate their reputations and masquerade as high-quality sellers. We find that these sellers reacted strongly to eBay’s announcement of a proposed ban on revoking. Interestingly, after the power of these strategic sellers is curtailed, we find evidence that they exert more efforts to improve their reputation scores. This study provides valuable insights about the relationship between reputation system and seller behavior, which have important implications for the design of online reputation mechanisms..
Third-party quality assurance seals have emerged as a prominent mechanism to reduce uncertainty and increase purchase conversion in online markets. However, systematic studies of the effectiveness of these seals are scarce. In this study, we exploit a unique data set of 9,098 shopping sessions at an online retailer's website to empirically measure the value and effectiveness of assurance seals on the likelihood of purchase by shoppers. The data set is collected from a randomized field experiment conducted by a large seal provider, which enables us to infer the causal impacts of the presence of an assurance seal. We find strong evidence that the presence of the assurance seal increases the likelihood of purchase conversion. We discuss the implications of our findings for online retailers, third-party certifiers, policymakers, and researchers.
Despite the significant potential for performance gains from health IT (HIT), there has been limited study of the mechanisms underlying successful HIT implementations. We conducted an extensive longitudinal field study to gain an understanding of the interplay between technology and patterns of clinical work embodied in routines. We use the analytical device of narrative networks to identify where and how HIT influences patterns of work. We further draw upon adaptive structuration theory to conceptualize HIT as an intervention that alters the flow of events in a narrative network. Our findings suggest that the key to successful implementation is to manage the co-evolution process between routines and HIT and to actively orchestrate a virtuous cycle through agentic action. We propose a dynamic process model of adaptive routinization of HIT that delineates the major channels through which HIT and routines interact, identifies the different stages in the dynamic co-evolution process, and isolates the pivotal role of two forms of agency in enabling the virtuous cycle of co-evolution. This is one of the first studies to offer a processual, microlevel analysis of HIT implementation in a clinical setting.
User-generated content has been hailed by some as a democratizing force that enables consumers to discuss niche products that were previously ignored by mainstream media. Nevertheless, the extent to which consumers truly prefer to use these new outlets to discuss lesser-known products as opposed to spending most of their energies on discussing widely marketed or already successful products has so far remained an open question. We explore this question by investigating how a population's propensity to contribute postconsumption online reviews for different products of the same category (motion pictures) relates to various indicators of those products' popularity. We discover that, ceteris paribus, consumers prefer to post reviews for products that are less available and less successful in the market. At the same time, however, they are also more likely to contribute reviews for products that many other people have already commented on online. The presence of these two opposite forces leads to a U-shaped relationship between a population's average propensity to review a movie postconsumption and that movie's box office revenues: moviegoers appear to be more likely to contribute reviews for very obscure movies but also for very high-grossing movies. Our findings suggest that online forum designers who wish to increase the contribution of user reviews for lesser-known products should make information about the volume of previously posted reviews a less-prominent feature of their sites.
We analyze how online reviews are used to evaluate the effectiveness of product differentiation strategies based on the theories of hyperdifferentiation and resonance marketing. Hyperdifferentiation says that firms can now produce almost anything that appeals to consumers and they can manage the complexity of the increasingly diverse product portfolios that result. Resonance marketing says that informed consumers will purchase products that they actually truly want. When consumers become more informed, firms that provide highly differentiated products should experience higher growth rates than firms with less differentiated offerings. We construct measures of product positioning based on online ratings and find supportive evidence using sales data from the craft beer industry. In particular, we find that the variance of ratings and the strength of the most positive quartile of reviews play a significant role in determining which new products grow fastest in the marketplace. This supports our expectations for resonance marketing.