Background: Increasing numbers of patients consult Web-based rating platforms before making health care decisions. These platforms often provide ratings from other patients, reflecting their subjective experience. However, patients often lack the knowledge to be able to judge the objective quality of health services. To account for this potential bias, many rating platforms complement patient ratings with more objective expert ratings, which can lead to conflicting signals as these different types of evaluations are not always aligned. Objective: This study aimed to fill the gap on how consumers combine information from 2 different sources—patients or experts—to form opinions and make purchase decisions in a health care context. More specifically, we assessed prospective patients’ decision making when considering both types of ratings simultaneously on a Web-based rating platform. In addition, we examined how the influence of patient and expert ratings is conditional upon rating volume (ie, the number of patient opinions). Methods: In a field study, we analyzed a dataset from a Web-based physician rating platform containing clickstream data for more than 5000 US doctors. We complemented this with an experimental lab study consisting of a sample of 112 students from a Dutch university. The average age was 23.1 years, and 60.7% (68/112) of the respondents were female. Results: The field data illustrated the moderating effect of rating volume. If the patient advice was based on small numbers, prospective patients tended to base their selection of a physician on expert rather than patient advice (profile clicks beta=.14, P<.001 call clicks beta=".28," p=".03)." however when the group of patients substantially grew in size prospective started to rely on rather than expert se="0.07," experimental study replicated and validated these findings for conflicting patient versus advice a controlled setting. ratings were aggregated from high number opinions evaluations affected more strongly by positive negative="3.06," sd="0.94;" meanexpert f1 conversely low volume participants compared with this effect occurred despite fact that they considered be less knowledgeable experts. conclusions: confronted information both sources simultaneously are influenced other patients. reverses rating has been small individual opinions. important implications how present health care provider aid their decision-making process.>
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