IJERPH, Vol. 17, Pages 1326: Exploring the Effect of Market Conditions on Price Premiums in the Online Health Community (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health)

Online health communities allow doctors to fully use existing medical resources to serve remote patients. They broaden and diversify avenues of interaction between doctors and patients using Internet technology, which have built an online medical consultation market. In this study, the theory of supply and demand was adopted to explore how market conditions of online doctor resources impact price premiums of doctors’ online service. Then, we investigated the effect of the stigmatized diseases. We used resource supply and resource concentration to characterize the market conditions of online doctor resources and a dummy variable to categorize whether the disease is stigmatized or ordinary. After an empirical study of the dataset (including 68,945 doctors), the results indicate that: (1) the supply of online doctor resources has a significant and negative influence on price premiums; (2) compared with ordinary diseases, doctors treating stigmatized diseases can charge higher price premiums; (3) stigmatized diseases positively moderate the relationship between resource supply and price premiums; and (4) the concentration of online doctor resources has no significant influence on price premiums. Our research demonstrates that both the market conditions of online doctor resources and stigmatized diseases can impact price premiums in the online medical consultation market. The findings provide some new and insightful implications for theory and practice.