User Engagement and User Loyalty Under Different Online Healthcare Community Incentives: An Experimental Study

The online healthcare community (OHC) has attained rapid development in recent years in which users are facilitated to exchange disease information and seek medical treatment. However, users' motivation of participation in OHCs is still under investigation. Taking the perspective of user perceived value, this paper examined the impacts of different incentive levels including identity incentive, privilege incentive, and material incentive on user perceived value, user engagement, and user loyalty. To test the proposed hypotheses, the study adopted the methods of the between-subjects experiment and questionnaire. Based on the data analysis by ANOVA and structural equation model, the results show there are significant differences in the impacts of different incentive levels on users' perceived value. Most of the incentive measures exert significant effects on simple user hedonic value and community identity value. Accordingly, the research findings suggest that affective support value and self-health management value demonstrate more importance for user engagement and user loyalty. Therefore, OHCs should try to improve users' affective support value and self-health management value which are the ultimate aims of the OHCs. Our study sheds some light on profoundly understanding the design of incentive mechanism of OHC and contributes to the research of OHC services.