Strategic Expectation Setting of Delivery Time on Marketplaces

Delivery speed is an essential component of the service provided by online delivery platforms. Because improving actual delivery speed is expensive, platforms can instead create a perception of faster delivery by showing a conservative estimate of the delivery duration when a customer places an order. We use detailed transaction-level data from a major food delivery marketplace to examine the effects of setting conservative delivery speed expectations on customers’ likelihood of future purchases and restaurant choices. When delivery is faster than expected, we find that customers are more likely to purchase again from the platform and the same (focal) restaurant they ordered from. However, we find no significant effect on future purchases from other (nonfocal) restaurants. This is possibly because of a spillover effect, as customers may switch to other restaurants. Our findings thus highlight the effect of setting conservative expected delivery times in a platform setting. Finally, we investigate the trade-off between current and future demand because of setting of a conservative estimated delivery time and show that the gain in future demand is greater than the loss in current demand, establishing the efficacy of our suggested strategy.