Abstract
Does the level of sunlight affect the tipping percentage in taxicab rides in New York City? We examined this question using data on 13.82 million cab rides from January to October in 2009 in New York City combined with data on hourly levels of solar radiation. We found a small but statistically significant positive relationship between sunlight and tipping, with an estimated tipping increase of 0.5 to 0.7 percentage points when transitioning from a dark sky to full sunshine. The findings are robust to two-way clustering of standard errors based on hour-of-the-day and day-of-the-year and controlling for day-of-the-year, month-of-the-year, cab driver fixed effects, weather conditions, and ride characteristics. The NYC cab ride context is suitable for testing the association between sunlight and tipping due to the largely random assignment of riders to drivers, direct exposure to sunlight, and low confounding from variation in service experiences.
Highlights
Tipping is an area of increasing interest in economics and social sciences [1,2,3] and represents a significant portion of the United States economy
We use ride-level data on licensed yellow cab rides in NYC available from the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) and used in the study conducted by Haggag and Paci [35]
Considering that there are nine ordinal sunlight categories between darkness and full sun, this corresponds to an estimated 0.5 to 0.7 percentage points increase in tipping when going from darkness to full sun
Summary
Tipping is an area of increasing interest in economics and social sciences [1,2,3] and represents a significant portion of the United States economy. The present study proposed both economic and noneconomic rationales for tipping. Supporting noneconomic rationale for tipping, Lynn and McCall [6] found a near-zero correlation between tip size and service evaluations and variability of less than two percent in tipping amounts. A lower correlation between tip size and service evaluation implies that customers could be primed by noneconomic motives for tipping. Rationales for tipping in the social psychology literature include doing a good thing, reducing guilt, abiding by social norms, and empathy and compassion toward service workers, among others [7]. Whereas an individual’s personality (e.g., individuals with greater empathy are likely to tip higher in different service contexts) and social conditioning (e.g., willingness to follow tipping norms) are generally stable, tipping could be influenced by more transient factors such as weather-induced moods
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
