Relational fairness by design: rebalancing roles in Korea’s public food-delivery platforms

Introduction Digital platforms built on inherited transactional designs often fail on relational dimensions. To diagnose these structural failures, this study uses Korea’s state-led public food-delivery platforms as a critical case, as they uniquely expose tensions between a public mission and a flawed, privately inherited architecture and move beyond existing research that focuses mainly on superficial, functional fixes. Methods Adopting relational fairness as an analytical lens—operationalized into three dimensions of (1) social recognition, (2) interdependent responsibility, and (3) reciprocal voice—we employ a qualitative service-design methodology, combining design ethnography and thematic analysis across three stakeholder groups (consumers, restaurant staff, and riders). Results The findings show that the current platform design systematically violates these three dimensions, producing systemic role distortions: consumers become “users without control,” restaurants are forced into “bi-directional responsibility mediators,” and riders act as “final bearers of responsibility” for breakdowns across the service chain. Conclusion Based on this diagnosis, we propose Relational Fairness by Design (RFD), a framework that translates relational fairness into three actionable principles—participatory choice and control, information transparency, and trust-based communication and reciprocal voice—and show how implementing RFD can reposition public platforms from passive intermediaries to active facilitators that mediate conflicts, redistribute responsibilities more fairly, and build sustainable public value.