国际经济贸易学院王韡副教授的合作论文The Effects of Surge Pricing on Driver Behavior in the Ride-Sharing Market: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment于2023年7月被国际权威期刊Journal of Operations Management正式发表。

文章链接：https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1223

论文摘要

Surge pricing has been used to coordinate supply and demand in the ride-sharing industry, but its causal effects on driver behavior remain unclear. This motivates us to examine how surge pricing causally affects driver earnings and labor supply by leveraging a unique quasi-experiment, in which a leading ride-sharing company in China introduced surge pricing in two cities at different times. Using a difference-in-differences design with the causal forest method, we find that surge pricing led to increases in drivers' weekly revenue. Decomposing the weekly revenue into “intensive margin” and “extensive margin” factors, we discover two countervailing effects at play: a cherry-picking effect and a competition effect, and the daily revenue decreased because the latter dominated. Consequently, the increased weekly revenue can be explained by the extensive margin: drivers worked on more days to compensate for the decreased daily revenue, a result consistent with the income targeting behavior. Finally, we examine heterogeneous treatment effects across drivers, and find that surge pricing enticed more part-time drivers to flood the market and crowd out full-time drivers, and that the increase in the drivers' weekly revenue was primarily driven by part-time drivers. Therefore, the benefit of surge pricing was unevenly distributed across drivers.

研究背景和研究意义

高峰定价是网约车平台在需求高峰时平抑需求的一种定价策略。高峰定价提高了网约车的价格，提高需求高峰时乘客的乘车费用的同时提高了网约车订单的收益。但是，对网约车司机是否能得到高峰定价产生的收益鲜有研究。本文利用头部网约车平台提供的基于田野实验的网约车订单数据，发现高峰定价吸引了兼职司机在高峰期接单但挤出了全职司机的订单，加深了我们对高峰定价如何影响不同类型网约车司机收入的理解。研究成果对网约车平台在高峰定价时如何补贴全职司机提供了策略建议。

作者介绍

王韡，对外经济贸易大学国际经济贸易学院副教授、博士生导师，华盛顿大学经济学博士。主要从事宏观经济学、发展经济学和产业经济学的学术研究。在《经济研究》、Journal of Operations Management、Research Policy等国内外权威期刊发表论文数十篇，主持多项国家级和省部级基金课题，曾获得中国留美经济学会邹至庄最佳论文奖。