Regulating TNCs: Should Uber and Lyft set their own rules?

By Sen Li, Hamidreza Tavafoghi, Kameshwar Poolla, Pravin Pratap Varaiya. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2019

123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We evaluate the impact of three proposed regulations of transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber, Lyft and Didi: (1) a minimum wage for drivers, (2) a cap on the number of drivers or vehicles, and (3) a per-trip congestion tax. The impact is assessed using a queuing theoretic equilibrium model which incorporates the stochastic dynamics of the app-based ride-hailing matching platform, the ride prices and driver wages established by the platform, and the incentives of passengers and drivers. We show that a floor placed under driver earnings pushes the ride-hailing platform to hire more drivers and offer more rides, at the same time that passengers enjoy faster rides and lower total cost, while platform rents are reduced. Contrary to standard economic theory, enforcing a minimum wage for drivers benefits both drivers and passengers, and promotes the efficiency of the entire system. This surprising outcome holds for almost all model parameters, and it occurs because the wage floors curbs TNC labor market power. In contrast to a wage floor, imposing a cap on the number of vehicles hurts drivers, because the platform reaps all the benefits of limiting supply. The congestion tax has the expected impact: fares increase, wages and platform revenue decrease. We also construct variants of the model to briefly discuss platform subsidy, platform competition, and autonomous vehicles.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Marketing, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/113b20d336389cb768df3908f19a83ae3c531b7e

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In Automotive Engineering

1. Hai Wang
2. Jintao Ke
3. Jieping Ye
4. Xinwei Li
5. Hai Yang

In Marketing

1. Hai Wang
2. Jintao Ke
3. Jieping Ye
4. Xinwei Li
5. Hai Yang

In Transportation

1. Hai Wang
2. Jintao Ke
3. Jieping Ye
4. Hai Yang

Citations in the corpus

• Pricing and equilibrium in on-demand ride-pooling markets (2020, background): “It is also worth mentioning that, Li et al. (2019a) point out that trip time reliability of ridepooling services is much worse than that of non-pooling services due to uncertain extra detour and waiting.”