The impact of social welfare and COVID-19 stringency on the perceived utility of food apps: A hybrid MCDM approach

Liz Hassad de Andrade; Jorge Junio Moreira Antunes; Antônio Mamede Araújo de Medeiros; Peter Wanke; Bernardo Pereira Nunes

doi:10.1016/j.seps.2022.101299

The impact of social welfare and COVID-19 stringency on the perceived utility of food apps: A hybrid MCDM approach

Socioecon Plann Sci. 2022 Aug:82:101299. doi: 10.1016/j.seps.2022.101299. Epub 2022 Mar 10.

Authors

Liz Hassad de Andrade¹, Jorge Junio Moreira Antunes², Antônio Mamede Araújo de Medeiros¹, Peter Wanke², Bernardo Pereira Nunes³

Affiliations

¹ EBAPE, Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil.
² COPPEAD Graduate Business School, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
³ School of Computing and Centre for Digital Humanities Research, the Australian National University, Australia.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has created enormous challenges for society due to the various ways of impacting health. This paper focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people's food consumption patterns in the online environment. We investigate food app reviews and examine whether countries with a high rate of success with COVID-19 control consume more unhealthy food through mobile apps. We also investigate whether the population of countries with low social welfare eat more unhealthy food during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to countries with high social welfare. We take a hybrid multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach to calculate indexes based on the technique for order of preference by similarity to an ideal solution, complex proportional assessment, and VlseKriterijuska Optimizacija I Komoromisno Resenje. Results show that country social welfare and success in COVID-19 control negatively affect the perceived utility of the apps. Also, success in COVID-19 control and the perceived utility of food apps positively affect the proportion of unhealthy reviews, whereas social welfare has a negative impact. The results have important implications for public health policymakers, showing that the online food environment can be an important setting for interventions that seek to incentivize healthy eating.

Keywords: COVID-19 control; Food consumption; MCDM; Online environment; Social welfare; Unhealthy food.