Sizzle or Fizzle? Supply and Consumption Dynamics of Home-Cooked Food on Sharing Platform

Abstract

To address the growing obesity crisis, governments are promoting home cooking to improve dietary habits. Home-cooked food-sharing platforms, a manifestation of the sharing economy, offer consumers healthy food options. While the economic benefits of the sharing economy have been extensively studied, little is known about its impact on non-economic factors, such as consumers’ health. To address this gap, we conduct an empirical study using data from a mobile kitchen-sharing platform and four controlled experiments to investigate whether the sharing economy helps consumers develop healthy eating habits. We use manual coding and machine learning methods to evaluate the healthiness of over 180,000 unique dishes and examine food provision and consumption on the platform. Our findings indicate that as consumers use the platform more frequently, they tend to consume more unhealthy food. Additionally, sellers who receive more orders and earn more revenue tend to offer less healthy food over time. Two controlled experiments prove consumers are more likely to order unhealthy food online. Furthermore, these experiments provide causal evidence that consumer food consumption patterns drive seller food provision rather than vice versa. Our results suggest that the sharing economy may have negative consequences due to misaligned interests between sellers and consumers. Fortunately, we identify conditions that may mitigate these effects in empirical analyses and two experiments. Specifically, consumers who choose dine-in options (as opposed to takeaway) and those who order for groups (as opposed to individual orders) tend to make healthier food choices on the platform due to impression management motivation.