Research

• Change in Online Taxi Drivers’ Labor Supply: Learning or Price Effect? Evidence from Tapsi. [Paper] [Slides]
  • Abstract: I quantitatively study the effect of online taxi drivers’ subjective belief about goodness of ride prices on their ride acceptance behavior. I develop a continuous-time search model based on two unique ride dispatching characteristics of Tapsi, an Iranian ride-hailing company, whose dataset is being used in a regression discontinuity setup to decompose the effect of exogenous price shocks on drivers’ ride acceptance into two components: (1) pure price effect, and (2) experience effect. A discrete-time simulation of the model shows how ride completion histories affects drivers’ expectations of future earnings. Results indicate how this decomposition allows us to explain heterogeneous responses to similar ride offers not only from different drivers but also from the same driver at different times.