Optimal Pricing Strategy for Multichannel Healthcare Services

As a combination of online and offline channel services, multichannel healthcare services currently play important roles in helping consumers solve their health problems. In this study, we establish a stylized model to investigate how healthcare service providers should price in multi-channels and when consumers should choose online service, taking misdiagnosis rate and the severity of disease problems into account. Our results show that the prices of the online channel and offline channel can increase when the misdiagnosis rate is low and minor problem inspection rate online is high. Moreover, when the diagnosis rate is high, the profit of online channel would increase, and then improve the profit of multichannel services. These findings provide insights for the theoretical research of online healthcare services and practice management on pricing strategies in multichannel healthcare services

Service Failure and Consumers’ Satisfaction with the Healthcare Industry: Moderating Role of Recommendation

This study explores the effects of service failure on different service attributes related to patients’ satisfaction (i.e., therapeutic effect and service attitude). We consider patients’ recommendation-seeking behavior and examine the moderating effects of recommendation before medical consultation and its differences between the online and offline word-of-mouth (WOM) recommendations. We collected over 3,000,000 reviews from a leading Chinese online health community to facilitate the empirical analysis. We use two ordinal logit models as bases and, find that service failure exerts a negative effect on patients’ both therapeutic effect satisfaction and service atti-tude satisfaction. Moreover, the effect of service fail-ure will be attenuated if patients seek recommenda-tions on doctors before consulting them. Moreover, the moderating effects of online WOM recommenda-tions is demonstrated to be lower than those of the offline ones. Our findings provide important perspectives for the literature and managerial suggestions for stakeholders

A strategic analysis of multi-channel expert services

Using stylized models, we investigate when and how expert service providers should offer their services online, and whether they should charge separate prices for face-to-face and online services or provide the online service as a free supplement. Interestingly, consumer surplus can rise when a monopolist charges different prices for face-to-face and online services, and it may drop when the monopolist starts offering the online service as a free add-on to its face-to-face service. We find that a market-wide adoption of the online channel by competing experts in a duopoly setting intensifies price competition and thereby reduces overall profits. Furthermore, the rate of adoption is highest when the online service is moderately effective, whereas one of the experts refuses to offer the service when it is highly effective. These results provide theoretical support for the viability of online expert services as well as practical guidance on pricing strategies.Farmer School of Business, Miami Universit