Entry of Online Grocery Delivery Services in the U.S. and Widening of the Nutritional Inequalities
by
Hyeonsik Shin
Ph.D. Student
Management Information Systems
Fox School of Business
Temple University
Friday, Jan 21
11:00 am – 12:30 pm | Zoom
Abstact:
Despite a series of policies, campaigns, and investments to curb the obesity epidemic, the obesity rate in the US has continuously risen for the past few decades. This paper examines the effect of third-party online grocery delivery services (OGDS) on the obesity rate. We posit that OGDS can reduce the obesity rate by increasing consumers’ access to healthy foods in popular grocery stores and promoting healthy dietary habits. By exploiting the nationwide quasi-experimental setting of Instacart’s staggered entries in the US county-level from 2004 to 2017, we find that the entry of Instacart lowers the obesity rate by 0.64%. Further analyses show, however, that the decrease in obesity rates following Instacart’s entry is greater in counties with higher personal income, more grocery stores, and lower child food insecurity rates. As the low-income population with poor access to healthy foods has been more vulnerable to obesity, our findings indicate that OGDS widen nutritional inequality gaps between the wealthy and the poor. This study contributes to the information systems (IS) literature by investigating an understudied type of digital platform offering necessity-based goods/services (i.e., provision of nutrition). Moreover, our study contributes to the IS literature on digital platforms by providing robust empirical evidence that points to the role of one of these platforms in exacerbating societal inequalities.