Don't Fake It If You Can't Make It: Driver Misconduct in Last-Mile Delivery

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Arora, Srishti; Choudhary, Vivek; Kireyev, Pavel
• 署名单位: INSEAD Business School; Nanyang Technological University; INSEAD Business School
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2023.01829
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: last-mile delivery; platforms; behavioral operations; misconduct; PRODUCTIVITY

摘要

In the last two decades, last-mile delivery (LMD) firms have seen immense growth fueled by the success of e-commerce, leading to faster and cheaper deliveries. Operating on thin margins, LMD firms strive for successful first-time deliveries to avoid the financial and reputational costs of reattempts. Delivery agents (DAs) are integral to LMD efficiency, influencing customer experience, delivery success, and productivity. However, most LMD performance enhancement research focuses on process, technology, and incentives, which presume workers will conform to procedures and monitoring tools will function flawlessly. Nevertheless, in practice, DAs deviate from expected behaviors, that is, indulge in misconduct, negatively affecting delivery efficiency, often resulting in returned parcels. One of the major forms of misconduct is entering fake remarks about deliveries, wherein DAs intentionally do not deliver the parcels and provide fake reasons for it. For instance, even without reaching a delivery address, a DA remarks customer unavailable and records a delivery failure. In this study, we collaborated with a leading Indian LMD firm and, using instrumental variable regression, found that such misconduct leads to a spillover productivity loss. This effect reduces the next day's successful deliveries by 1.60% and first-time-right deliveries by 1.86%. We discuss misconduct's correlation with factors such as task complexity and offer novel insights into how opportunistic circumstances can influence worker behavior.