On the Relocation Behaviour of Ride-sourcing Drivers

TL;DR

This study investigates how ride-sourcing drivers choose their relocation strategies, revealing significant behavioral variations and the impact of surge pricing and distance on their decisions, informing platform policy improvements.

Contribution

It provides novel insights into driver relocation behavior through a detailed choice experiment and analyzes effects of various attributes on driver decisions.

Findings

Surge pricing encourages drivers to move to high-demand areas.

Distance from surge zones reduces likelihood of following platform recommendations.

Driver behavior varies significantly across different groups.

Abstract

Ride-sourcing drivers as individual service suppliers can freely adopt their own relocation strategies including waiting, cruising freely, or following the platform recommendations. These decisions substantially impact the balance between supply and demand, and consequently affect system performance. We conducted a stated choice experiment to study the searching behaviour of ride-sourcing drivers and examine novel policies. A unique dataset of 576 ride-sourcing drivers working in the US was collected and a choice modelling approach was used to estimate the effects of multiple existing and hypothetical attributes. The results suggest that relocation strategies of ride-sourcing drivers considerably vary between different groups of drivers. Surge pricing significantly stimulates drivers to head towards the designated areas. However, the distance between the location of drivers and surge or high-demand areas demotivates them to follow the platform repositioning recommendations. We discuss the implications of our findings for various platform policies on real-time information sharing and platform repositioning guidance.