Analysis of Taxi Drivers' Behaviors Within a Battle Between Two Taxi Apps

A battle between two Chinese taxi booking mobile apps, namely, Didi and Kuaidadi, had recently occurred in early 2014. These two apps, which are backed by Internet giants Tencent and Alipay, gave promotion fees to taxi drivers for each deal made and also allowed each taxi passenger to save some money, when a customer had taken a taxi through the app and paid the fare through the mobile payment method. As expected, the taxi service pattern had been greatly changed during this battle. To address the debates on social justice, equity, and improvements of taxi service, we collect 37-day trip data of over 9000 taxis in Beijing to study the influence of this pattern change. In the first 18 days, the battle had not occurred and in the remaining 19 days, the battle is white-hot. We quantitatively demonstrate how several important service indices (e.g., the traveling distances and idle time lengths) of taxi drivers had been changed. The spatial-temporal traveling patterns of taxis are then studied. Based on comprehensive analysis, the benefits and drawbacks brought by money promotion are finally discussed. The obtained results indicate that productively employing big data can help answer some important questions attracting the interest of the whole society.