Essays on information technology for healthcare and sustainable traffic management

Information technology has fundamentally changed the world in every aspect. In this collection of research papers, I study some effects of IT in two domains - healthcare and sustainability - that closely related to human wellbeing. Levering the power of IT to redistribute resources, healthcare platforms have emerged to connect patients and physicians timely and economically. I study the strategic decisions of each party (Chapter 1) and the service design problem (Chapter 2) on such a two-sided platform using both theoretical modeling and data analytical tools. In Chapter 3, I study on a sustainable traffic management mechanism to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. In Chapter 1, we consider on-demand healthcare platforms that allow patients to seek care online from distributed doctors. Healthcare costs have been steadily increasing, while patient experience continues to sour with costly (many times unnecessary) commute and waiting. To alleviate the costs, various on-demand healthcare platforms have emerged but have been little investigated in academic research. We develop a strategic queueing model where the platform decides the commission rate upon which potential doctors make their participation, service quality and pricing decisions and potential patients make their service acquisition decisions independently. We find that in equilibrium a higher commission rate always lowers doctor participation as well as service quality, but it may increase the service price if it significantly softens the competition. Moreover, as patient intensity increases, the service quality improves, accompanied largely with a higher price. We further investigate the effect of platform price control. We find that allowing the platform to control the service price in addition to the commission rate may result in more doctor participation, higher service quality and price, higher platform profit, and surprisingly even higher profit for the doctors. This generally occurs when the patient intensity is either low or high, the waiting cost is low, or the doctor heterogeneity is low. Our results are useful to understand the performance of on-demand healthcare platforms. In Chapter 2, we focus on the service design problems of on-demand healthcare platforms. Many platforms offer patient subsidy in the form of a short-duration Q&A service at a meager price to induce user adoptions. Using a rich panel data from an on-demand healthcare platform in China, we investigate the impact of such service on demand for online consultations and offline appointments. We find that the subsidized service increases online service purchases and offline appointments by 4.7% and 8.7% in the subsequent month, respectively. Also, users’ expenditure on the online service in the following month increases by 15% after consuming the subsidized service, which highlights the revenue potential of such a service. Besides, we demonstrate the heterogeneity of spillover effects among different types of medical concerns and providers of different ranks. Our results shed light on the importance of such information-based services, which help manage the patient’s needs. In Chapter 3, we study an innovative routing mechanism to decrease GHG emissions in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT). Climate changes and global warming have become a severe issue that concerns people and governments all over the world. The combustion of fossil fuels, such as gasoline and diesel to transport people and goods, is one of the largest sources of CO2 emissions that heat the atmosphere. In this paper, we propose a combined information design and tolling mechanism to route traffics to decrease emissions. We formulate and characterize the equilibrium of a stochastic congestion game through the technique of potential functions. To evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism, we define a new metric called Environmental Price of Anarchy that captures the inefficiency in congestions and emissions resulted from vehicles’ selfish behaviors. Our work highlights the advantages of the combined approach that improves both the utilities of vehicles and the welfare of society