Spatial Distribution of Supply and the Role of Market Thickness: Theory and Evidence from Ride Sharing

This paper develops a strategy with simple implementation and limited data requirements to identify spatial distortion of supply from demand -or, equivalently, unequal access to supply among regions- in transportation markets. We apply our method to ride-level, multi-platform data from New York City (NYC) and show that for smaller rideshare platforms, supply tends to be disproportionately concentrated in more densely populated areas. We also develop a theoretical model to argue that a smaller platform size, all else being equal, distorts the supply of drivers toward more densely populated areas due to network effects. Motivated by this, we estimate a minimum required platform size to avoid geographical supply distortions, which informs the current policy debate in NYC around whether ridesharing platforms should be downsized. We nd the minimum required size to be approximately 3.5M rides/month for NYC, implying that downsizing Lyft or Via-but not Uber{can increase geographical inequity

Empirics of firms' strategies in new industries

This dissertation consists of three essays on the empirics of firms' strategies in new industries. In the first chapter, I study the spatial mismatch between consumers and bikes in the dockless bike-sharing industry and an externality exacerbating the problem: when a consumer uses a bike for a low and inflexible price, she both displaces another consumer's usage for a potential higher-value trip, and may ride the bike to unpopular destinations. With a trip-level dataset of a bike-sharing company in Beijing, China, I develop a spatial structural model to estimate the demand for bikes with search frictions and local matchings. Compared to the scenario in which consumers always get bikes immediately, I find that local spatial mismatch between consumers and bikes reduces the total usage by 29.95%, or a net loss of 332,979 trips. Counterfactual analyses show that (1) doubling the number of bikes increases the trip volume by 28.46% while halving the number of bikes decreases the trip volume by 46.40%; (2) price-discriminating against short trips by 2% increases the total trip time by 0.22%; and (3) changing the frequency of bike reshuffling does not have a significant impact on the total usage of bikes. In the second chapter, I study how efficient capital markets are in supplying funds to new firms by looking at how a platform start-up, ofo, made its investment decisions in response to capital infusions. I fit the business performance of ofo, a bike-sharing platform start-up, in China and show how its financial conditions affected investment decisions. I analyze the effects of funding rounds from venture capitalists on the investment and business of the company with an event study framework. My estimates find that the firm increased its users and bikes by about 40% two weeks before receiving funds, suggesting that it spent much more on bike fleet and promotional offers in expectation of capital infusions. I also show that such boosts in business performance were short-lived: the number of trips and users often returned to normal levels two weeks after the funding day. My findings suggest that the capital market is inefficient in supplying funds to start-up companies. In the third chapter, I study the shakeout in the U.S. automobile industry with data retrieved from old annals of the automobile industry. I simulate a research productivity model and see if I could successfully trigger a shakeout. I find that only the cost reduction from technology advancements is not enough to trigger an industry shakeout and propose that more extreme settings are needed for further studies

2nd Symposium on Management of Future motorway and urban Traffic Systems (MFTS 2018): Booklet of abstracts: Ispra, 11-12 June 2018

The Symposium focuses on future traffic management systems, covering the subjects of traffic control, estimation, and modelling of motorway and urban networks, with particular emphasis on the presence of advanced vehicle communication and automation technologies. As connectivity and automation are being progressively introduced in our transport and mobility systems, there is indeed a growing need to understand the implications and opportunities for an enhanced traffic management as well as to identify innovative ways and tools to optimise traffic efficiency. In particular the debate on centralised versus decentralised traffic management in the presence of connected and automated vehicles has started attracting the attention of the research community. In this context, the Symposium provides a remarkable opportunity to share novel ideas and discuss future research directions.JRC.C.4-Sustainable Transpor

Urban Informatics

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity

Urban Informatics

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity

Travellers' profiles definition using statistical multivariate analysis of attitudinal variables

This paper aims at presenting a set of travellers' typologies using attributes characterizing people's attitude, through an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), and a subsequent cluster analysis (CA), based on the obtained latent constructs. The final goal is to contribute to deepen the knowledge on market segmentation in order to define more people-oriented transport policies, focusing on a medium size Italian city, Alessandria. Six factors have been defined on which the k-means cluster analysis has been applied finding four travellers' profiles. Results confirm certain hypothesis from behavioural psychological theories. Attitude-behaviour relationships loosen when habits, consolidated in time, do intervene; moreover in small-medium urban context, as opposed to large and dense cities, insufficient transport supply does not favour the use of alternative modes to the motor vehicle, if not to the cost of a great loss in efficiency. In fact, the study shows how significant constraints such as necessity, time saving, and low transport supply (mainly designed around students going to school) are in determining a behavioural change, so that the ‘‘right general attitudes'' are not sufficient to obtain a real modal shift. This leads to expect opportunistic behaviours, even within a overall positive attitude towards the environment. Actually, that overall positive attitude is not enough to prompt consistent behaviour unless a marked self-control and strong motivation are present. These two features seem to be missing in the interviewed sample of population, unlike what emerges from other studies undertaken in Northern Europe. The geographic location most likely plays a significant role in such a difference. Indeed, cultural background and the prevailing habits of the population may well explain the ‘‘slackening'' of the bond between moral norms and behaviour, and the subsequent search for surrogates (e.g. the high willingness to pay for environmental protection) to justify the unwillingness to forgo the private vehicle on behalf of more sustainable modes. Finally, our study seems to prove that education could play a key role in transport policy formulation but, moreover, in social policy, as individuals more akin to modal shift are those showing higher levels of instructio