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COVID-19 and the Demand for Online Grocery Shopping: Empirical Evidence from the Netherlands
- Source :
- De Economist
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2021.
-
Abstract
- There has been a pronounced increase in online shopping since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the effect of the pandemic on demand for online grocery shopping specifically, using municipality-level data from a Dutch online supermarket. We find that an additional hospital admission increased app traffic by 7.3 percent and sales per order by 0.31 percent. Local hospital admissions do not correlate with the variety of groceries ordered, but online search behavior does, suggesting that hoarding behavior is driven by the general perception and impact of the virus rather than local conditions. Local COVID-19 conditions also have different effects in urban versus non-urban municipalities, with local hospital admissions increasing app traffic in urban areas but lowering sales per order as compared to non-urban areas. It remains to be seen whether the demand for online grocery shopping will permanently increase as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10645-021-09389-y.
- Subjects :
- Original Paper
Economics and Econometrics
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
05 social sciences
COVID-19
Online grocery shopping
Advertising
R22
Consumer behavior
Order (business)
Online search
0502 economics and business
Pandemic
D12
L81
Food consumption
Hoarding (economics)
050202 agricultural economics & policy
Business
050207 economics
Empirical evidence
Consumer behaviour
Public finance
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 15729982 and 0013063X
- Volume :
- 169
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- De Economist
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....7e356db3b21e93762d96cf40ac92ee0e