The Consensus Effect on Shared Treatment Experience in Online Healthcare Communities

Abstract

Online healthcare communities have become increasingly popular among patients, enabling them to access massive health-related information and to connect to a large population of patients who suffer from similar health problems. Extant research has demonstrated the important role that others’ shared opinions play in the decision-making process of individuals. In this paper, we are therefore interested in investigating how other patients’ inconsistency of treatment experience affects patients’ perceived treatment effectiveness. By viewing consensus as the exploratory cost for patients to find diversified health information and by controlling individual heterogeneity and the inhomogeneous weighting function of social influence on patients, we find that consensus has a positive impact on patients’ perceived treatment effectiveness. We also find that this effect is moderated by the discussion volume, the scope of discussed issues, and patients’ social connectedness. Because perceived treatment effectiveness is closely related to patients’ medical decisions about treatments, we provide a discussion of the implications of these findings on pharmaceutical marketing and public policies.