The Impact of the Gig Economy on Product Quality Through the Labor Market: Evidence from Ridesharing and Restaurant Quality

Minkyu Shin (), Jiwoong Shin (), Soheil Ghili () and Jaehwan Kim ()
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Minkyu Shin: City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong
Jiwoong Shin: Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520
Soheil Ghili: Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520
Jaehwan Kim: Korea University, Seoul 02841, South Korea

Management Science, 2023, vol. 69, issue 5, 2620-2638

Abstract: This paper seeks to demonstrate the impact of the gig economy on product quality in seemingly unrelated local industries through the labor market. Our empirical context is the quality of service for restaurants in the city of Austin, and we examine how they were impacted by the exogenous exit and reentry of rideshare platforms, Uber and Lyft, because of regulatory changes. We leverage these exogenous shocks and combine them with sentiment-analyzed data from Yelp reviews that capture how customers assess the quality of service at each restaurant. We show that, compared with control cities, customers in Austin become more negative about service quality when Uber and Lyft are present in the city. Additionally, we use rich data on employee turnover and wages to demonstrate that service staff turnover increases in Austin when Uber and Lyft are present compared with the control cities. We also conduct several additional studies and robustness checks that are all congruent with our hypothesis that Uber and Lyft lower the quality of service in Austin restaurants by raising their staff turnover. Together, these results suggest significant ramifications of the gig economy on the broader industries through the labor market.

Keywords: gig economy; labor market; Uber/Lyft; restaurant quality; Yelp reviews; diff-in-diff; text analysis; employee turnover rate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:69:y:2023:i:5:p:2620-2638

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