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. 2022 Jun 7:10:917522.
doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.917522. eCollection 2022.

Understanding the Inequality of Web Traffic and Engagement in Online Healthcare Communities

Yuan-Teng Hsu  1 , Ran Duan  2 , Ya-Ling Chiu  3   4 , Jying-Nan Wang  3   4
Affiliations

Understanding the Inequality of Web Traffic and Engagement in Online Healthcare Communities

Yuan-Teng Hsu et al. Front Public Health. .

Abstract

The online healthcare community (OHC) is a kind of doctor-patient communication platform, in which doctors can share medical knowledge and provide various kinds of counsel for patients. However, if the OHC's web traffic is concentrated on a small number of doctors, or if only a few doctors are actively involved in the OHC's activities, this will not be conducive to the optimal development of the OHC. This study explores this issue of inequality and makes three main innovations. First, based on data on web traffic and engagement extracted from 139,037 doctors' web pages in one popular OHC, we point out how serious the inequality phenomenon is. Second, we confirm that the Matthew effect indeed exists in this context and leads to greater inequality. Third, we demonstrate that the inequality of psychological or material rewards causes the inequality of web traffic or engagement to become worse; hence, an appropriate reward mechanism should be designed to mitigate the Matthew effect rather than enhance it. Finally, we discuss the managerial implications of these results, as well as avenues for future studies.

Keywords: Gini index; Matthew effect; inequality; online healthcare community; reward mechanism.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Number of doctors in 10 major specialty areas.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Number of doctors activating the web pages in different quarters.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The inequality of increased web traffic and increased engagement.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Lorenz curves for increased web traffic and increased engagement.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Influences of cumulative web traffic and cumulative engagement.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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