Engaging Physicians with Introductory Incentives: The Role of Online and Offline References

Incentives make or break user contributions. While providing introductory incentives to attract new users becomes increasingly popular among online communities, its impact on user contributions remains largely unknown. Utilizing a policy change of doubling incentives to physicians in a leading online health community, we examine 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 vary by their online and offline income references. We find that, despite an increase in physician contributions during the policy window, the introductory incentives unintendedly decreased physician contributions after the policy window. Additionally, physicians tend to anchor their contributions with reference to online income rather than their offline income, suggesting mental accounting at play. Our findings add to the literature a cautionary perspective on the unintended consequence of introductory incentives and unveil the associated mechanism of mental accounting when users make contributions (or lack thereof) to online communities. These findings provide important implications for incentive design and user engagement for online communities.