The Use of Recommendations on Physician Rating Websites: The Number of Raters Makes the Difference When Adjusting Decisions

Physician rating websites allow users to check physicians? profiles, write reviews, or rate their performance. The opinion of other users regarding a physician can affect our decision to visit her/him. To investigate the specific role of the number of users rating a physician when choosing a physician with support of these platforms, we used a Judge-Advisor System in which participants answered their likelihood to visit a physician before and after seeing the recommendations of others. Within the experiment, three conditions were presented: high and low number of reviewers recommending a physician, and no recommendations. We found that the participants? likelihood to visit a physician varied with respect to the displayed physician characteristics on the platform. Importantly, after the recommendation of others was presented, participants? likelihood to visit the physician changed significantly. The participants? adjusted response was significantly closer to the recommendation coming from a higher number of users, which indicate that this online, social media cue influences our decision to visit physicians. Comments and ratings on physician ratings are generally positive, but we show that negative ratings have a direct negative influence in the decision to visit a physician. We suggest administrators of these platforms to pay special attention to the content that users upload.