Effect of Doctors Reputation on Patient Appointment in Online Health Communities Research scarcely explores whether the effect of doctoru0027s reputation on the firstvisiting and revisiting patients are identical in online health communities (OHCs). Based on Reputation Theory, the effect of doctoru0027s online and offline reputations on firstvisiting and revisiting patients are investigated by using the data from an online medical community. Moreover, the moderating roles of doctoru0027s personal effort and patient disease type are explored. Doctoru0027s reputation can be seen to have a stronger effect on revisiting patient than firstvisiting patient. Specifically, doctoru0027s online reputation exerts a positive effect on both firstvisiting and revisiting patients, whereas doctoru0027s medical title in doctoru0027s offline reputation has no significant effect. Research results have significant practical values to promote the making of a tendentious resource arrangement in the OHCs.

Social influence tactics in ecommerce onboarding: The role of social proof and reciprocity in affecting user registrations Abstract   Given the increasing competition to attract new customers, ecommerce providers (i.e., etailers) are being urged to optimize their website onboarding journeys. Design mechanisms employing social influence tactics seem to be promising avenues to effectively improve user onboarding experiences. Specifically, two social influence tacticsxe2x80x94namely, reciprocity and social proofxe2x80x94are widely used in practice to reliably enhance user registrations. Yet, researchers have only tentatively examined how these combined tactics affect user onboarding behavior. While combining both tactics may hold synergistic potential, it may also be counterproductive, as too much social influence may backfire. We address this research gap by investigating the distinct and joint effects of reciprocity and social proof on user registration behavior. Drawing on two forms of reciprocity (i.e., utility and monetarybased reciprocity), we conduct an online experiment (Nxe2x80xafxe2x80xaf249) and a related randomized field experiment (Nxe2x80xafxe2x80xaf475,495) to compare both reciprocity variants in combination with social proof and investigate their efficacy for actual user onboarding decisions (i.e., user registrations). Our results show that both social influence tactics and both reciprocity variants have positive effects on usersu0027 registration behavior if applied individually. However, when both tactics are employed together, the effect of reciprocity is moderated by social proof such that social proof nullifies the effect of monetarybased reciprocity whereas it amplifies the effect of utilitybased reciprocity. Our study thereby contributes to a more advanced understanding of the interactive relationship between reciprocity and social proof and their joint effect on user onboarding decisions.