Timely or detailed? The impact of information disclosure on citizen co-production

During public health crisis, effective information disclosure is crucial for the government to guide citizens’ participation in social recovery. In this paper, we focus on the influence of the timeliness and detail of information disclosure on citizens’ co-production behavior. We divide citizens’ co-production behavior into online information concern behavior and offline pandemic compliance with preventive behavior. Adopting a mixed-methods design combining regression analysis and behavioral experiments, this study quantitatively analyzed more than 5,800 pieces of data from 293 prefecture-level cities and 158 citizens’ experimental data. The results indicate that timely and detailed information disclosure is associated with significant effects on citizens’ co-production behavior. However, due to constraints on government human resources and time, it is recommended to adopt a general content and timely disclosure policy for information concerning behavior. A detailed content but non-timely disclosure policy is recommended for citizen compliance with preventive behavior. Findings have important implications for governmental public health crisis management.