Impacts Of Taxi Hailing Apps On Taxi Drivers’ Behavioral Decision And Operation Performance:An Integrated View Of Technical Efficiency And AllocativeEfficiency

We reside in a physical world, but live an increasingly digital life. Digital technologies-the internet, mobile phones, and all the other tools for collecting, storing, analyzing,and sharing information-have spread quickly and invade into traditional industries as well as public transportation areas. Taxi cabs, which are the important part of city transportation system, are surffering from the problem of low operation efficiency. This problem has been an important issue to the citizen travel and city development. Taxi hailing app, which is an reprensentative of new digital technologies, provided a new way to solve city travel problems. But it has brought cities new problems or even conflicts between traditional taxi drivers and platform. As technology moves on and the traditional operation pattern is being eliminated, it’s urgent to study how this new technology bring taxi drivers new value and help them to increase performance.According to Farell(1957)’s productive efficiency framework, while new technology bringing new technical progress to the production, it has impacts on productive efficiency(technical efficiency and allocative efficiency). These efficiencies will influence the final performance of technology. Previous researches, which were based on Resources Based View, believed that Information Technology would increase enterprise technical efficiency via improve decision behavior, organization structure or management processes. But they ignored the impact on allocative efficiency. Taxi hailing app didn’t bring drivers technical efficiency while applying in the social context. So it’s natural and urgent to re-evaluate its efficiency from both technical efficiency and allocative efficiency.Under this practical and academic background, we used technical efficiency framework to research how taxi hailing apps influence the taxi drivers’operational performance. We used exploratory case study, theory development and empirical methods to verify our assumptions. We have done three major work and findings.First, we used exploratory case study to find how taxi hailing app change the way taxi drivers operate. In the field study we found that drivers’decision behavior would influence the technical efficiency of app. We also found that the preference of drivers is heterogeneous and can be divided into drivers who prefer long orders and those prefer short orders. And after the use of taxi hailing app, drivers would get more orders that meet their expectations. So the app would increase the allocation of different type of drivers.Secondly, we empirically verified the assumption that the technical efficiency were influenced by the drivers behavior. We used natural experiment to compare the behavior and performance difference before and after using taxi hailing app. We found that the reference point still exists in the information space and the revenue reference is order length but whole income. So after using taxi hailing app, drivers became picky and would use this app to get long orders. But influenced by the reference point, drivers income and vacancy rate hadn’t increased.Thirdly, we empirically verified the assumption that after using taxi hailing app, the allocation of drivers resources were optimized. Because app would allow drivers to choose orders that fit their flavor and would let drivers who prefer long order get more long orders and vise versa. So we used Stochastic Frontier Analysis to analyse the improve of allocation efficiency. Results show that the introduction of app would help to cover the shortage that there was not enough drivers that like short orders. And the long-short drivers allocation efficiency increased significantly. Robust check show that the introduction of taxi hailing app would help those who have not tactics when operating, and let them become more diplomatic thus optimized resource input.This study illustrated how information technology changed the way people work and how it realize its value in a new view. Results were solid and scientific and would help government to make proper policies.