报告题目：Food Delivery Service and Restaurant: Friend or Foe?

报 告 人：陈曼璐

报告时间：2020年11月23日（周一），13：30-15：00

报告地点：线上

主办单位：现代供应链管理研究院

【报告人简介】

Manlu Chen is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Operations Management at Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University. She received her B.Sc. in MORSE (Mathematics, Operational Research, Statistics and Economics) from the University of Warwick, UK. Her research interests focus on queueing economics and service operations analytics. Here is Manlu’s personal webpage: https://www.manluchen.com/. 

【摘要】

With food delivery services, customers can hire delivery workers to pick up food on their behalf. To investigate the long-term impact of food delivery services on the restaurant industry, we model a restaurant serving food to customers as a stylized single-server queue with two streams of customers. One stream consists of tech-savvy customers who have access to a food delivery service platform. The other stream consists of traditional customers who are not able to use a food delivery service and only walk in by themselves. We study a Stackelberg game, in which the restaurant first sets the price of the food; the food delivery platform then sets the delivery fee; and, last, rational customers decide whether to walk in, balk, or use a food delivery service if they have access to one. We show that the food delivery platform does not necessarily increase demand for the restaurant but may just change the composition of customers, as the segment of tech-savvy customers grows. Hence, paying the platform for bringing in customers may hurt the restaurant’s profitability. Furthermore, under conditions of no coordination between the restaurant and the platform, we show, somewhat surprisingly, that more customers having access to a food delivery service may hurt the platform itself and the society, when the food delivery service is sufficiently convenient and the pool of delivery workers is large enough. This is because the restaurant can become a delivery-only kitchen and raise its food price, leaving little surplus for the platform. This implies that limiting the number of delivery workers provides a simple yet effective means for the platform to improve its own profit while benefiting social welfare.