Consumer Impatience and Market Structure: The Case of Online Pizza Delivery

Consumer impatience, i.e. a high discount rate of future, implies that consumers desire to acquire money or other goods very quickly. Research on consumers' perceptions of the time value of money abounds. However, hardly any paper has looked at the effect of consumer impatience on competition. In this research we study how impatience for food consumption affects firms' entry. Using a unique dataset of online orders of delivery pizza, we show that people significantly constrain their decision set in favor of pizzerias that are very local. A number of exogenous shocks allow us to distinguish their preference for pizzerias from their preference for quick food. We find that the impatience for online delivery leads to a large number of pizzerias which would otherwise never enter the market.