Cross-platform vs Within-platform: the Spillover Effect of Doctor’s Knowledge Sharing on their Online Consultation Volume

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-886-8_19How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Online consultation; Health knowledge sharing; Spillover effect; Trust transfer

Abstract

Through the sharing of knowledge among doctors, patients can learn moreabout medicine and manage their own health. It’s an important way for patients to form initial impressions of their doctors. Meanwhile, patient medical choice behavior is key for online consultation platforms’ profitability. Doctors’ knowledge sharing behaviors provide patients with a way to assess their doctors’ competence. In previous research, scholars have delved into the profound effect that doctors sharing their medical expertise can have on patients’ decision-making processes. This phenomenon has been extensively scrutinized as it pertains to healthcare decisions and outcomes., but mainly focused on the correlation within the platforms, ignoring the cross-platform perspective of the impact. Drawing on the theory of trust transfer, this study employs a panel regression model to examine how doctors’ knowledge-sharing behaviors within and across platforms influence online consultations through spillover effects. We use data collected from the short-video platform Douyin and its consultation module Xiaohe Health, as well as the online consultation platform Haodf. The dataset comprises 468 doctors and 30,624 balanced panel observations. The results indicate that the knowledge sharing of doctors has a positivedirect spillover effect on the in-platform online consultation, and a positive indirect spillover effect on cross-platform online consultation, leading to an increase in both within-platform and cross-platform online consultations. This reveals the doctors’ knowledge sharing behaviors’ spillovers within-platform and cross-platform, provides favorable evidence for the convenience of online healthcare access, and offers managerial insights for social and online consultation platform development policies.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Li Chen
AU  - Xu He
AU  - Qianru Lai
AU  - Yanghui Li
AU  - Xusheng Wu
AU  - Zhiqun Zhang
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/11/06
TI  - Cross-platform vs Within-platform: the Spillover Effect of Doctor’s Knowledge Sharing on their Online Consultation Volume
BT  - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Internet Finance and Digital Economy (ICIFDE 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 190
EP  - 201
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-886-8_19
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-886-8_19
ID  - Chen2025
ER  -