EXPRESS: Making Delivery Platform Drivers Safer: Platform Responsibility versus Consumer Empowerment

The increasing frequency of traffic accidents involving food delivery drivers has raised public concern about the safety of fast delivery services. In response, food delivery platforms have introduced two corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies to enhance drivers’ road safety: One in which the platform assumes full responsibility for extending delivery times, and another that empowers consumers to decide on extended delivery times. Additionally, policymakers are mandating that platforms purchase employment injury insurance for their drivers. Despite these efforts, debates continue over how platforms should adjust delivery times to mitigate driver risk and whether new driver protection policies are truly effective. In this study, we employ the Hotelling model to examine a duopoly food delivery market in which consumers are socially responsible, time-sensitive, and exhibit heterogeneous loyalty to competing platforms. Building on the consumer empowerment framework, we investigate the optimal CSR strategy choices for these platforms and assess the resulting impacts on various stakeholders. Our analysis provides three key insights. First, we demonstrate that offering differentiated extended delivery time (EDT) options can mitigate the negative impact of consumer aversion to empowerment on platform profitability, especially in markets with a significant consumer heterogeneity in time sensitivity. Second, we identify a potential all-win CSR outcome, wherein positively shaping consumer attitudes benefits all stakeholders, a possibility often overlooked in practice. Third, we surprisingly find that the widely adopted protective measure, namely the mandatory insurance policy (MIP), does not effectively mitigate driver risk. In contrast, our proposed risk-based MIP (RMIP) addresses this limitation and allows consumers who actively participate in CSR initiatives to benefit from a lower markup on delivery fees. These insights offer a refined analytical framework for understanding consumer empowerment, providing valuable guidance for researchers, platform operations managers and policymakers.