Cooking or Clicking: The Impact of Online Food Delivery Platforms on Domestic Food Preparation.

One of the most notable changes to emerge from the sharing economy is the striking increase in on-demand services. In this work, we examine how such platforms (e.g. Grubhub, UberEats, and Doordash) affect a particularly important household activity, meal preparation, and dining behaviors of American households. To do so, we exploit the phased entry of the platform Grubhub into US counties from 2005 to 2019 using a difference in difference approach. Results indicate that the availability of an increasingly diversified delivery service leads to a significant reduction in time spent preparing meals within the home. Further, and alarmingly, we find that this impact is associated with an increase in the average BMI of affected persons; indicating an unfavorable dietary shift from healthier home cooking to unhealthier food away from home consumption. Implications for research, consumers, platforms, and public policymakers are discussed within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]