300 / 2024-04-24 10:57:35

Making Delivery Platform Drivers Safer: Platform Responsibility versus Consumer Empowerment

food delivery platform,platform responsibility,consumer empowerment,driver welfare,corporate social responsibility (CSR)

The increasing number of platform-delivery-related traffic accidents has aroused public concerns about the safety issue on faster delivery. To improve driver safety, delivery platforms have recently proposed two types of corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies to extend the delivery time: the platform solely takes up responsibility for drivers’ safety, or the platform empowers consumers to engage in driver-protection initiatives. At the same time, policymakers also require delivery platforms to purchase insurance for independent drivers. However, the debates on how delivery platforms should relax delivery deadlines to reduce driver risk continue, and the effectiveness of these new measures for driver protection still remains unclear. In this paper, we use the Hotelling model to explore a duopoly delivery market in which platforms can strategically determine their CSR strategies to compete for socially responsible and time-sensitive consumers. Our analysis yields three relevant insights regarding CSR outcomes and policy effectiveness. Firstly, we reveal when inducing consumers' choices under the empowerment strategy helps mitigate the negative effects of consumer attitudes. Second, we uncover an all-win opportunity for CSR outcomes to occur when consumers are encouraged to develop an increasingly positive attitude, which is unfortunately abandoned in the real world. Thirdly, we surprisingly find that the commonly used protection measure, namely the mandatory insurance policy (MIP), fails to reduce delivery drivers' risk, while our proposed risk-based MIP (RMIP) could overcome this disadvantage. Under RMIP, consumers with active participation in CSR activities can receive a monetary reward from a low markup in delivery fees.