Abstract: Ride-sourcing companies such as Uber, Lyft and Didi Chuxing are transforming the way people travel in cities. These companies provide ride-hailing applications that intelligently match riders to drivers; drivers are private car owners who drive their own vehicles to provide ride-for-hire services for profit. Since their advent in 2009, ride-sourcing companies have enjoyed huge success, but also created many controversies. One of them centered on surge pricing, which algorithmically varies price across different geographic areas and periods. In this talk, we present an equilibrium modeling framework for analyzing ride-sourcing systems to estimate the impacts of surge pricing on the overall system performance. We will discuss critical ingredients of the modeling framework, including capturing drivers’ labor supply decision, and approximating the market frictions due to the matching technology adopted by a ride-sourcing platform to match riders and drivers. We will then configure the framework to develop various models to investigate the pricing of the ride-sourcing markets and its welfare impacts. Potential regulatory policies are subsequently discussed.

Bio: Dr. Yafeng Yin is a Professor at Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He works in the area of transportation systems analysis and modeling, and has published approximately 100 refereed papers in leading academic journals. Dr. Yin is the Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies. He is also an Associate Editor of Transportation Science, and serves on the editorial boards for another four transportation journals such as Transportation Research Part B: Methodological. Dr. Yin received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 2002, his master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1996 and 1994 respectively. Prior to his current appointment at the University of Michigan, he was a faculty member at University of Florida between 2005 and 2016. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher and then assistant research engineer at University of California at Berkeley between 2002 and 2005. Between 1996 and 1999, he was a lecturer at Tsinghua University. Dr. Yin has received recognition from different institutions. He was one of the five recipients of the 2012 Doctoral Mentoring Award from University of Florida in recognition of his outstanding graduate student advising and mentoring. One of his papers won the 2016 Stella Dafermos Best Paper Award and the Ryuichi Kitamura Paper Award from Transportation Research Board. He was recently elected to serve on the International Advisory Committee of the International Symposium of Transportation and Traffic Theory (ISTTT).