Strategies to change eating behaviours in food delivery applications

Abstract

Obesity and overweight are problems that are more and more present in today’s society. In order to overcome these issues, it is important to change consumers’ eating behaviours. There has been a lot of research around this subject in order to find the most effective strategy to change these behaviours in different contexts (eating at a restaurant, grocery shopping, among others). However, the food delivery applications are a quite recent market that has not been studied for this purpose. The implementation of nudges is a strategy that has been deeply studied to change undesirable eating behaviours. As such, this dissertation considers two types of nudges – cognitively oriented and affectively oriented – and price changes as possible strategies to implement in food delivery applications. As an extra analysis, it is also studied whether demographics and personal factors influence how effective each strategy is. Even though the results suggested that the most effective strategy is changing the price, followed by implementing a cognitively oriented nudge and, lastly, an affectively oriented one, the analysis did not have any statistical power. It is also clear that demographics, namely gender, and personal factor such as self-control and the habit of reading labels of food products have a role on the efficacy of these strategies.

Date of Award	27 Jan 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Daniel Fernandes (Supervisor)