Title:
Essays on Online Behavior in Medical Crowdfunding

dc.contributor.advisor Hu, Yu Jeffrey
dc.contributor.author Hur, Yunyoung
dc.contributor.committeeMember Li, Xitong
dc.contributor.committeeMember Lin, Mingfeng
dc.contributor.committeeMember Zhang, Han
dc.contributor.committeeMember Narasimhan, Sridhar
dc.contributor.department Business
dc.date.accessioned 2022-08-25T13:27:51Z
dc.date.available 2022-08-25T13:27:51Z
dc.date.created 2021-08
dc.date.issued 2021-07-20
dc.date.submitted August 2021
dc.date.updated 2022-08-25T13:27:51Z
dc.description.abstract In the context of medical crowdfunding, this dissertation investigates how individual reactions are diversified as they encounter certain events online. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on the two types of events: the social endorsement cue and the varying physical attractiveness of patients in medical crowdfunding cases. In the first chapter, we examine how the impact of social influence changes in the presence of non-social cues of various strengths in affecting a user’s likelihood to donate. We conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment to find that the impact of social influence depends on its relational informational value in the presence or the absence of alternative credible information sources. The findings of this study suggest that informational social influence dominates normative social influence in this context, contributing to both the literature and the managerial insights by uncovering user behavior in medical crowdfunding and related fields. In the second chapter, we examine the differential impact of physical attractiveness on the two types of prosocial behavior: sharing and donation. Based on the large-scale randomized field experiment, we discover that the impact of physical attractiveness depends on whether the online behavior is private or public, as people behave less restricted in private and behave to manage image in public. The findings of this study contribute to understanding the controversies in the existing research and provide a guideline in building online business strategies.
dc.description.degree Ph.D.
dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1853/67121
dc.language.iso en_US
dc.publisher Georgia Institute of Technology
dc.subject Medical Crowdfunding
dc.subject Online Behavior
dc.subject Physical Attractiveness
dc.subject Social Influence
dc.title Essays on Online Behavior in Medical Crowdfunding
dc.type Text
dc.type.genre Dissertation
dspace.entity.type Publication
local.contributor.advisor Hu, Yu Jeffrey
local.contributor.corporatename Scheller College of Business
relation.isAdvisorOfPublication 827524b2-da89-48ee-a2ff-5d18773e8f6e
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication a2f83831-ae41-4d65-82ff-c8bf95db4ffb
thesis.degree.level Doctoral
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