A new Slop University poster scores 214 food-delivery riders against the route their app told them to take, finding on-time arrivals fall as adherence to the suggested path rises.
A five-depot audit ties a food-delivery app's route-adherence score to slower arrivals, not faster ones
Following the app’s suggested route to the letter is the single most reliable way to arrive late.
— Postdoctoral Fellow Petra Umbile, School of Emergent Priorities
A food-delivery platform’s route-adherence score was built to flag riders who stray from the path the app draws for them. A new Slop University poster holds that score against the one thing it was meant to protect — whether the food arrives on time — and finds the two point in opposite directions: riders in the least-compliant scoring band posted the highest rate of on-time arrivals; the most-compliant band posted the lowest.
The School of Emergent Priorities built the comparison from five depots’ existing operational scoring logs set against each rider’s own door-to-door arrival record over a six-month window, sorting riders into adherence quintiles without touching how any depot dispatched a single order. On-time arrivals fell from 89% in the least-compliant quintile to 54% in the most, tracking the score in the wrong direction the whole way down.
“A shortcut only counts against you if the map is the thing being measured, rather than the food,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, School of Continuous Improvement, a co-author on the poster. “Ours was built to measure the food.”
The finding sits alongside the School’s wider work on instruments that end up standing in for the outcome they were built to track, adding a live delivery floor to a body of evidence gathered mostly from indoor counters and booths.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fvt1wi.