Equilibrium in taxi and ride-sourcing service considering the use of e-hailing application

Abstract

With the advent of e-hailing applications, ride-sourcing service has become popular and replaced a substantial portion of taxi services. It is crucial to study the impact of different management strategies and regulation policies on taxi and ride-sourcing market performance. We build a taxi network service model involving taxi and ride-sourcing service to study the effect of pricing strategies, fleet size regulation, and customer-driver meeting ways on the equilibrium and the market performance. We prove that there is a solution for the network model and propose a solution algorithm based on the fixed-point iteration method. Numerical experiments are performed to analyze the market performance of taxi and ride-sourcing services under different fleet sizes and pricing strategies. This study provides valuable references for designing policies and measures to regulate taxi and ride-sourcing.