The Impact of Uber and Lyft on Taxi Service Quality: Evidence from New York City

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Negotiating Dependencies and Precarity in the On-Demand Economy

“…Drivers assert that the most significant, lasting impact of the advent of platforms like Ola is that it has changed how customers connect with drivers, which also means that the ways in which platform mediation impacts driver-passenger interaction is of vital importance. Whilst a well-known benefit of ride-hailing platforms for customers is that they do away with haggling over fares (Ahmed, Johnson, and Kim, 2018;Kameswaran et al, 2018) since these are determined by the platform, new points of contention arise. In particular, we wish to highlight two interrelated themes that recurrently surfaced in our interviews, which are around: 1) platform-determined routes, and 2) unilaterally determined rates and hidden service charges.…”

“…Ride-hailing literature has covered disputes around route, particularly around whether drivers are likely to take a longer route to get a higher fare (Ahmed, Johnson, and Kim, 2018;Liu, Brynjolfsson, and Dowalatabadi, 2015). In response to customer complaints about drivers taking longer routes, Ola changed the basis of fare calculation to the most optimal route computed by Google Maps.…”