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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sociol.

Sec. Work, Employment and Organizations

Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1666695

What Leads Users to Recommend, Not Just Use? Unpacking Service Quality, Labor Perceptions, and Conscious Consumer Choice in Food Delivery Apps

Provisionally accepted
  • 1Universidad de Las Americas, Santiago, Chile
  • 2Universidad Catolica del Norte, Antofagasta, Chile

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

This study examines how perceptions of service quality, working conditions, and socially conscious consumption influence the intention to use and recommend food delivery applications in Chile. Drawing on the Stimulus–Organism–Behavior–Consequence (SOBC) theoretical framework, this study simultaneously analyzed functional factors, namely efficiency, fulfillment, system availability, and privacy, and ethical-social factors, such as perceived working conditions. A quantitative design was employed with a sample of 416 users, evaluating the constructs through validated scales and applying Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The results indicate that service quality is the strongest predictor of intention to use and positively affects both the intention to recommend and socially conscious consumption. In contrast, working conditions do not directly influence intention to use but positively impact intention to recommend and socially conscious consumption. Socially Conscious consumption, in turn, influences only the intention to recommend and not the intention to use. The findings confirm that, in digital contexts, socially conscious consumers tend to express their values more through recommendations than through purchase decisions. These insights offer relevant implications for academia and practice, suggesting that integrating operational efficiency with fair labor practices can strengthen the sustainability of platform-based business models.

Keywords: Delivery Apps1, service quality2, Socially Conscious Consumption3, working conditions4, Intention to Recommend5, SOBC Mode6

Received: 15 Jul 2025; Accepted: 30 Sep 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Serrano-Malebrán and Molina. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Jorge Serrano-Malebrán, jserrano@udla.cl

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