The impact of online food delivery service on eating-out behavior: a case of Multi-Service Transport Platforms (MSTPs) in Indonesia

Online food delivery services, provided under the multi-service transport platforms such as Grab and Gojek, could significantly change people's eating-out behavior, which could also change the spatial distribution of restaurants in the long run. This study attempts to empirically identify factors affecting people's preference on the use of online food delivery services using stated preference (SP) survey data collected with a multi-day smartphone-based travel diary survey in Jakarta, Indonesia. In the survey, we randomly chose observed eating-out trips (i.e., revealed preference (RP)) from a travel diary and asked whether the respondents would like to shift to an online food delivery service in a hypothetical situation in which the delivery cost, delivery time, food cost, and available food types vary across questions. This RP-SP combination allows us to elicit respondents' preference under the real time-space constraints they had (e.g., he or she must start to work again from 13:00). Our empirical analysis confirms that delivery time and delivery cost are important factors affecting people's preference. We also discuss the long-term impact of the behavioral changes on the spatial distribution of online food merchants and its policy implications.