Patient Uncertainty About Physician Online Service Availability

In online medical consultation platforms, the situation when patients pursue a physician who has no availability to respond to the request is averse to patients, physicians, and the platform. We explore a potential coordinating mechanism by information intervention in the platform, namely service availability information disclosure. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the intervention, we first explore whether capacity is the potential constraint to the physicians’ acceptance rate. After that, we explore the effect of the intervention on matching efficiency and quality. Our result demonstrates that there is a negative relationship between the number of consultation requests received, which is the premise of the effectiveness of the intervention.