Don’t Fake It If You Can’t Make It: Driver Misconduct in Last-Mile Delivery
研究印度最后一公里配送公司中司机虚假备注包裹未送达的不当行为，发现该行为导致次日成功配送减少1.60%、首次配送成功率下降1.86%，对管理者有警示作用。
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. This paper was accepted by Elena Katok, operations management. Funding: V. Choudhary acknowledges the support received from Ministry of Education, Singapore [Grant RS12/20]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.01829 .