Putting a Price on Immobility: Food Deliveries and Pricing Approaches

Runyu Wang and Haotian Zhong

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Urban food delivery services have become an integral part of daily life, yet their mobility and environmental externalities remain poorly addressed by planners. Most studies neglect whether consumers pay enough to internalize the broader social costs of these services. This study quantifies the value of access to and use of food delivery services in Beijing, China, through two discrete choice experiments. The first measures willingness to accept compensation for giving up access, with a median value of CNY588 (approximately USD80). The second captures willingness to pay for reduced waiting time and improved reliability, showing valuations far exceeding typical delivery fees (e.g., CNY96.6/hour and CNY4.83/min at work). These results suggest a substantial consumer surplus and a clear underpricing problem. These findings highlight the need for urban planning to integrate digital service economies into pricing and mobility frameworks. We propose a quantity-based pricing model that targets delivery speed rather than order volume, addressing the primary source of externalities while maintaining net welfare gains. This approach offers a pragmatic, equity-conscious strategy to curb delivery-related congestion, emissions, and safety risks, especially in dense urban cores.

Date: 2025-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-env, nep-sea and nep-tre
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.26636 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2510.26636

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().