Discriminatory attitudes between ridesharing passengers
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Discriminatory attitudes between ridesharing passengers Scott Middleton1 · Jinhua Zhao1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Prior studies have provided evidence of discrimination between drivers and passengers in the context of ridehailing. This paper extends prior research by investigating passenger-topassenger discriminatory attitudes in the context of ridesharing. We conducted a survey of 1110 Uber and Lyft users in the US using Mechanical Turk, 76.5% of whom have used uberPOOL or Lyft Shared rides, and estimated two structural equation models. The first model examines the influence of one’s demographic, social and economic characteristics on discriminatory attitudes toward fellow passengers in ridesharing, and how such influence varies by the targets of discrimination (i.e., race and class). The second model examines the influence of one’s generic social dominance orientation on discriminatory attitudes in the ridesharing context. We find that discriminatory attitudes toward fellow passengers of differing class and race in the shared ride are positively correlated with respondents that are male or are women with children. A respondent’s race does not have a significant effect on discriminatory attitudes, but white respondents that live in majority white counties are more likely to hold discriminatory attitudes with regard to race (no effect is observed regarding class preferences). The same is true of respondents that live in counties in which a larger share of the electorate voted for the Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential election. Conversely, higher-income respondents appear more likely to hold discriminatory attitudes regarding class, but no effect is observed regarding racial preferences. We also find that one’s generic social dominance orientation strongly influences his/her discriminatory attitudes in ridesharing, supporting the claim that behavior in shared mobility platforms reflects long-standing social dominance attitudes. Further research is required to identify policy interventions that mitigate such attitudes in the context of ridesharing. Keywords Ridesharing · Discrimination · Social dominance · Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) · Class · Race
* Jinhua Zhao [email protected] 1
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
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Transportation
Introduction Prior studies have provided evidence for driver-to-passenger discrimination in the context of ridehailing services provided by transportation network companies (TNCs) like Lyft and Uber. Seminal research by Ge et al. (2016), for example, provided experimental evidence that the design of Uber and Lyft’s platforms allows for discrimination from individual drivers to riders (Ge et al. 2016). Recent research from UCLA, however, has argued that TNC services have nearly eliminated racial and ethnic differences in service quality, relative to the taxicab industry (Brown 2018). Though lacking the experimental approach of Ge et
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