Research On Travelers' Behavioral Intention And Platform's Strategy Under Ride-hailing Services

With the development of mobile Internet technology,various of new travel options with the feature of sharing economy are facilicated by ride-hailing platforms,e.g.Uber,Didi,and ride-hailing service has been one of the most improtant travel modes in urban transportation rapidly.Therefore,several new management issues on transportation generated.On one hand,as more convenient and cheaper travel options opreated for urban residents,the travel behavior of travelers has changed gradually.On the other hand,the opration of ride-hailing services is influenced by some factors like network externality,then issues of pricing decision need to be studied.Furthermore,the phenomenon of illegal opearation from both platform and driver exists due to the deficiency of policy regulation at early stage,hence it is essicential to introduce more effective regulation policies.By the research theories,which include transportation science,behavioral decision,consumer behavior,two-sided market,evolutionary game,etc,and structure analysis of ride-hailing services,this study is carried out with a framework of micro view of travelers' travel behavior,middle view of platform's strategy and macro view of policy regulation.Specifically,the research content and results are presented as follows.Firstly,travlers' behavioral intention towards ride-hailing services is analyzed based on the research of perceived value and other theories of consumer behavior.The concept model of perceived value is established with perceived benefit and perceived sacrifice.Among them,perceived benefit consists of perceived usefulness,perceived enjoyment and social image.And perceivd sacrifice consists of perceived fee and perceived risk.In addition,factors of policy and social influence are also considered.Based on the concept model,an empirical study is put forward with the survey data,the relationship between perceived benefit,perceived sacrifice,policy,social influence and behavioral intention is analyzed.Besides,the effect of socio-demographic factors and usage experience is further examined.Secondly,travelers' travel mode choice behavior of ride-hailing services is studied based on multinomial probit model.In this study,ride-hailing services are considered from fast-ride,tailored-ride and carpool.Moreover,other main travel modes in urban transportation are introduced simultaneously.The factors of socio-demographic information,usage experience,travel scenarios and variables of social psychology are further considered.Eight travel scenarios are constructed from the combination of activity(commute and recreation),travel period(peak travel period and off-peak travel period)and price level of ride-hailing services(normal level and discount level).What is more,the variables of social psychology include behavioral intention,perceived value and subjective norm.Based on the results of parameter estimation and marginal effects,the effect of variables on travelers'travel mode choice behavior is investigated.Thirdly,the pricing decision of ride-hailing platform is studied by considering network externality and two-sided market theory.As the core feature of platform economy,network externality includes inter-group network externality and inner-group network externality.In addition,two user structures are introduced,i.e.both travelers and drivers are single-homing,travelers multi-homing and drivers single-homing.Four models of ride-hailing platform's pricing strategy are constructed by the combination of network externality and user structure.Further,the factors of average waiting time and driver's commission rate are considered in order to reflect the characteristic of ride-hailing industry.Based on the results of model deduction,the price structure,user scale and profit of ride-hailing platform are analyzed.Fourthly,the price decision issue with context of compatibility of ride-hailing platform is further studied based on the two-sided market model of ride-hailing platforms.Two compatibility scenarios of ride-hailing platform are constructed according to the structure of cross platform transaction cost,i.e.cost paid by travelers or platforms.Consistent to previous study,to reflect the feature of ride-hailing industry,the factors of average waiting time and driver's commisision rate are introduced.The price structure,user scale and profit of ride-hailing platform with these two scenarios are summarized and compared based on the results of model deduction.Finally,the policy regulation strategy of ride-hailing market is analyzed based on evolutionary game theory.The payoff matrix is built based on the analysis of the main stackholders in ride-hailing market,i.e.government or management department,ride-hailing platform and driver.Then the tripartite evolutionary model is established with the payoff matrix.The evolutionary path and stable strategy of government or management department,ride-hailing platform and driver are studied based on the results obtained with the method of model deduction and numerical study.