Social movements boosted online orders for US Black-owned restaurants after the murder of George Floyd

Sumit Agarwal, Yupeng Lin and Jean (Jieyin) Zeng ()
Additional contact information
Sumit Agarwal: National University of Singapore
Yupeng Lin: National University of Singapore
Jean (Jieyin) Zeng: National University of Singapore

Nature Human Behaviour, 2025, vol. 9, issue 1, 65-73

Abstract: Abstract We use the rise of Black Lives Matter and the sentiment of racial sympathy to examine the interplay between the social movement and citizens’ sympathetic actions in supporting Black people. Using detailed food order flow information from one of the largest online food delivery platforms in the USA, we find that the total number of food orders from Black-owned restaurants increased by 39% relative to nearby non-Black-owned restaurants in the 140 days following the murder of George Floyd on the basis of a difference-in-difference model. The platform company’s strategic traffic allocation acted as an accelerator, enhancing the sympathetic responses of individuals, but it did not drive the entire surge in food orders. Protests resulting in severe injuries and those linked to demands for defunding the police diminished the positive sympathetic responses, highlighting a potential risk associated with protests. Our study provides large-scale, micro-level evidence that social movements and increased sympathy can foster collective actions to support marginalized communities.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02038-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nat:nathum:v:9:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41562-024-02038-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-02038-9

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().