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INFORMS International Conference on Service Science

INFORMS-CSS 2019: Smart Service Systems, Operations Management, and Analytics pp 365–378Cite as

What Makes a Helpful Online Review for Healthcare Services? An Empirical Analysis of Haodaifu Website

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Abstract

The online healthcare websites bring more healthcare resources to patients, reduce time cost, and break geographical restrictions. However, the information explosion brought by the healthcare website also increased the difficulty in information screening and trust establishment for risky healthcare service . The online review is an important resolution for information asymmetry. This paper explores the review significance of healthcare websites by examining the impact of review depth and valence on the review helpfulness , especially in the context of different risk level diseases. We employed a secondary data econometric analysis obtained as 44,938 pieces of reviews from Haodaifu.com. We found that both review depth and valence have a significant impact on review helpfulness. And review depth has a more significant impact when review valence is low. But the disease risk moderates the impact, that is, review depth is more useful for low-risk diseases than high-risk diseases. Also, the disease risk moderates the impact of review valence . For low-risk diseases, neutral reviews have a more positive impact on the review helpfulness . For high-risk diseases, extreme reviews have a greater impact on the review helpfulness. These findings can help to understand users’ needs on healthcare websites and establish more effective ways to do communication.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, China

    Ya Gao & Ling Ma

Authors
  1. Ya Gao
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  2. Ling Ma
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Correspondence to Ling Ma .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Hui Yang

  2. Division of Engineering and Information Science, Pennsylvania State University, Malvern, PA, USA

    Robin Qiu

  3. Department of Supply Chain Management, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, USA

    Weiwei Chen

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Gao, Y., Ma, L. (2020). What Makes a Helpful Online Review for Healthcare Services? An Empirical Analysis of Haodaifu Website. In: Yang, H., Qiu, R., Chen, W. (eds) Smart Service Systems, Operations Management, and Analytics. INFORMS-CSS 2019. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30967-1_33

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