The job of public transport, ride-hailing and delivery drivers: Conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic and implications for a post-pandemic future

The influence of social drivers on using ride-hailing services

“…The phobia of pandemic is continuing, which has created panic among ride-hailing users, thus adversely affecting ride-hailing customers. In absence of the research on ride-hailing, our findings are consistent with the findings of Hegde et al (2022) and Fielbaum et al (2023).…”

“…The word "infodemic" coined by Rothkopf (2003) used in our study describes the misinformation and ambiguities, which have deleterious consequences on individual behavior (Freiling et al, 2023). Infodemic signals even the "non-risky behavior" as "risky behavior," which may restrict the action of consumers (Fielbaum et al, 2023;Samal, 2021), particularly in ride-hailing. Finally, the dependent variable of our research is "intention to use", which is described by an individual's willingness to engage in a particular behavior after assessing the consequences (Hooda et al, 2022).…”

“…The coronavirus-related misleading information, its transmission and its consequences have been documented by Freiling et al (2023) and preventive actions were suggested by Seetharaman (2020). The availability of a vast amount of inaccurate information (knowingly or unknowingly) on social media resulted in panic among ride-hailing users (Fielbaum et al, 2023;Hegde et al, 2022). In the absence of literature on the effect of infodemic on the intention to ride-hailing, we take the support of anecdotal evidence that the consumers keep away from these services based on the hearsay that they may be infected with the virus and it may be life-threatening.…”

“…Due to rising costs, consumers exhibit an incredible passion for rotation, reuse and sharing assets to economize costs and derive benefits (Liu et al ., 2022). As a result, few sharing economy models such as home-sharing peer-to-peer loan platforms, clothe-leasing platforms, crowdsourcing platforms and ride-hailing have become popular (Cheah et al ., 2020; Rossmannek et al ., 2022) and ride-hailing model has emerged as a most effective alternative to public transportation (Cheng et al ., 2017; Fielbaum et al ., 2023; Li et al ., 2023).…”

“…Working along these lines, ride-hailing companies make extensive use of social media to communicate and resolve the queries of their users (Mosseri, 2022), thereby enhancing consumer interactions. The COVID-19 outbreak caused negative conversations on social media, which in turn damaged the ride-hailing sector (Fielbaum et al ., 2023; Morshed et al ., 2021). As a result, information on pandemics with life-threatening consequences (termed as ‘infodemic) was shared on social media (Tan et al ., 2022).…”