Abstract

With food deliveryservices, customers can hire delivery workers to pick up food on their behalf.To investigate the long-term impact of food delivery services on the restaurantindustry, we model a restaurant serving food to customers as a stylizedsingle-server queue with two streams of customers. One stream consists oftech-savvy customers who have access to a food delivery service platform. Theother stream consists of traditional customers who are not able to use a fooddelivery service and only walk in by themselves. We study a Stackelberg game,in which the restaurant first sets the food price; the food delivery platformthen sets the delivery fee; and, last, rational customers decide whether towalk in, balk, or use a food delivery service if they have access to one. Weshow that the food delivery platform does not necessarily increase demand forthe restaurant but may just change the composition of customers, as the segmentof tech-savvy customers grows. Hence, paying the platform for bringing incustomers may hurt the restaurant's profitability. We demonstrate that aone-way revenue-sharing contract with a price ceiling or a two-wayrevenue-sharing contract can coordinate the system and create a win-win.Furthermore, under conditions of no coordination between the restaurant and theplatform, we show, somewhat surprisingly, that more customers having access toa food delivery service may hurt the platform itself and the society, when thefood delivery service is sufficiently convenient and the pool of deliveryworkers is large enough. This is because the restaurant can become adelivery-only kitchen and raise its food price by focusing on food-deliverycustomers only, leaving little surplus to the platform. This implies thatlimiting the number of delivery workers can provide a simple yet effectivemeans for the platform to improve its own profit while benefiting the socialwelfare.

Time

12月9日（星期三）15:30-17:00

Speaker

Manlu Chen is a Ph.D.candidate in Operations Management at Nanyang Business School, NanyangTechnological University. Her research interests focus on queueing economics,service and healthcare operations analytics. Prior to her Ph.D., she obtainedB.Sc. in MORSE (Mathematics, Operational Research, Statistics and Economics)from the University of Warwick, UK. Here is her personal webpage:https://www.manluchen.com/.      Contactemail: chen1078@e.ntu.edu.sg

Venue

ZOOM会议ID：95870573269

参会密码：931231