Sharing Economy, Platforms, and Crowds
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Paper Number
2626
Paper Type
short
Description
In this paper, we address the question: how does a monetary incentive influence the empathy expressed in peer users’ and counselors’ responses to questions posted anonymously in online mental health platforms (OMHPs) by individuals suffering from some mental health issue. Rooted in the literature on mental health and empathy and incentives, we hypothesize that a monetary incentive given competitively after passing challenges is likely to increase the expression of cognitive empathy in online responses of all responders in an OMHPs, but the increase in expression of cognitive empathy in online responses will be higher for peer users as compared to counselors. We test our hypotheses using data on 1,455,941 responses to questions from two of the most prominent OMHPs in China in a natural experiment setting after developing a measure of empathy in responses using machine learning methods based on recent approaches from the computer science and medicine fields. Our results provide support to our hypotheses.
Recommended Citation
Zhou, Junjie; Kishore, Rajiv; and Lee, Michael, "Effect of a monetary incentive on responders’ empathy in online mental health platforms" (2023). ICIS 2023 Proceedings. 17.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2023/sharing_econ/sharing_econ/17
Effect of a monetary incentive on responders’ empathy in online mental health platforms
In this paper, we address the question: how does a monetary incentive influence the empathy expressed in peer users’ and counselors’ responses to questions posted anonymously in online mental health platforms (OMHPs) by individuals suffering from some mental health issue. Rooted in the literature on mental health and empathy and incentives, we hypothesize that a monetary incentive given competitively after passing challenges is likely to increase the expression of cognitive empathy in online responses of all responders in an OMHPs, but the increase in expression of cognitive empathy in online responses will be higher for peer users as compared to counselors. We test our hypotheses using data on 1,455,941 responses to questions from two of the most prominent OMHPs in China in a natural experiment setting after developing a measure of empathy in responses using machine learning methods based on recent approaches from the computer science and medicine fields. Our results provide support to our hypotheses.
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