Engaging Physicians with Introductory Incentives: References to Online and Offline Income
研究在线健康社区对医生提供双倍入门激励的影响，发现激励期内医生贡献增加，但激励结束后贡献反而下降，且医生更参照线上收入而非线下收入做决策，揭示了心理账户的作用。
Incentives make or break user contributions. While providing introductory incentives to attract new users has become increasingly popular among online communities, their impact on user contributions remains largely unknown. Utilizing a policy change that doubled the incentives paid to physicians in a leading online health community, we examined the impacts of both the initiation and the termination of such introductory incentives on physician contributions (in terms of patient consultations) and how the impacts varied according to the physician’s online and offline income. We found that despite an increase in physician contributions during the policy window, the introductory incentives unintentionally decreased physician contributions after the policy window ended. Additionally, physicians tended to anchor their contributions using their online rather than offline income as a reference point, suggesting that mental accounting was at play. Our findings provide a cautionary perspective on the unintended consequences of using introductory incentives and reveal the associated mechanisms of mental accounting when users make contributions (or not) to online communities. These findings provide important implications for incentive design and user engagement in online communities.