Journal of Student Research 2018

The Impact Of Uber’s Presence On Taxi Fare

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Figure 1: Increase in supply

Based on this theory, I arrive at the following empirically testable

hypothesis:

H1: The presence of Uber in a taxi market is associated with decreased average taxi fare in that market.

Data

To perform the analysis, I collected the average taxi fare in several cities throughout the United States. These cities were chosen based on the fares available on TaxiFareFinder.com, which is publicly available. The website provided one-mile, five-mile, and 10-mile fare estimates based on actual fares and a mathematical algorithm. 2 I originally collected data for 370 taxi markets, for 2016 fares, which produced a cross-sectional dataset, as I only gathered data for one specific period. Out of the 370 observations, 265 were used in the final analysis (some observations were removed due to duplicates in geographic locations, e.g., multiple markets and fares were identical in San Francisco).

Figure 2: Locations of taxi markets used

2 Please see TaxiFareFinder.com for more information on this algorithm.