This paper presents an economic analysis of on-demand food-delivery platforms and investigates management strategies that protect restaurant owners and for-hire gig workers in the sharing economy. We consider two markets that are both operated based on sharing economy: (a) the food-delivery market where a platform offers on-demand food-delivery services to customers; and (b) the ride-sourcing market where a platform provides on-demand ride-hailing services to passengers. These two markets are interdependent as the two platforms share the same pool of for-hire drivers. An economic equilibrium model is proposed to capture the incentives of food-delivery customers, ride-hailing passengers, restaurant owners, for-hire drivers, the food-delivery platform, and the ride-sourcing platform. The profit-maximizing decisions of each platform are modeled, and both competitive and collaborative interactions between the platforms are characterized. Based on the model, we first investigate the impacts of a cap on the commission rate charged to restaurant owners. We find that within certain regime the commission cap would benefit restaurants. However, beyond this regime, the commission cap becomes overly-protective, and further reducing it will induce increased costs for food-delivery customers, reduced earnings for food-delivery couriers, reduced profits of the food-delivery platform, which can even lead to slightly reduced earnings for the restaurants, making everyone worse off in the food-delivery market (compared to a less aggressive commission cap). Furthermore, we consider an alternative strategy where no regulatory intervention is necessary and the food-delivery and ride-sourcing services are integrally operated by a single platform. We show that collaboration between the two platforms can offer a Pareto improvement when the market demand of the ride-sourcing service is relatively small.

本文介绍了按需送餐平台的经济分析，并研究了在共享经济中保护餐馆老板和临时工的管理策略。我们考虑两个均基于共享经济运作的市场：(a) 外卖市场，平台为客户提供按需外卖服务；(b) 网约车市场，平台为乘客提供按需网约车服务。这两个市场是相互依存的，因为这两个平台共享同一个出租司机库。提出了一个经济均衡模型来捕捉外卖客户、乘车乘客、餐馆老板、出租司机、外卖平台和乘车平台的激励。每个平台的利润最大化决策被建模，并且平台之间的竞争和协作交互都具有特征。基于该模型，我们首先调查了上限对向餐馆老板收取的佣金率的影响。我们发现，在某些制度下，佣金上限将使餐馆受益。但是，在这个制度之外，佣金上限变得过度保护，进一步降低将导致外卖客户成本增加，外卖快递员收入减少，外卖平台利润减少，甚至可能导致餐馆的收入略有下降，使每个人在送餐市场的境况都变得更糟（与不那么激进的佣金上限相比）。此外，我们考虑了一种替代策略，即无需监管干预，外卖和叫车服务由单一平台统一运营。我们表明，当拼车服务的市场需求相对较小时，两个平台之间的协作可以提供帕累托改进。