The Deterrent Effect of Ride-Sharing on Sexual Assault and Investigation of Situational Contingencies

Jiyong Park (), Min-Seok Pang (), Junetae Kim () and Byungtae Lee ()
Additional contact information
Jiyong Park: Bryan School of Business and Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina 27412
Min-Seok Pang: Fox School of Business, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
Junetae Kim: Graduate School of Cancer Science and Policy, National Cancer Center, Goyang-si, Korea
Byungtae Lee: College of Business, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul, Korea

Information Systems Research, 2021, vol. 32, issue 2, 497-516

Abstract: Sexual assault is one of the most repellant and costly crimes, which inflicts irrecoverable harms on victims and society. This study examines the effect of information technology (IT)-enabled ride-sharing platforms on sexual assaults. Drawing upon routine activity theory from the criminology literature, we posit that ride-sharing can reduce a passenger’s risk of being a suitable target of sexual assault by providing a more reliable and timely transportation option for traveling to a safer place. By exploiting the nationwide quasi-experimental setting of Uber’s city-by-city rollouts in the United States during 2005–2017, we demonstrate that Uber’s entry into a city is negatively associated with the number of rape incidents. To zoom into the effects of ride-sharing at a more granular level, we employ precinct-hour–level data on Uber pickups and rape occurrences in New York City in 2015 and conduct spatiotemporal analyses. Our results from the spatiotemporal analyses corroborate those of the quasi-experiment and further reveal situational contingencies in the deterrent effect of ride-sharing. Specifically, ride-sharing contributes to a more significant reduction in the likelihood of rape occurrences in neighborhoods with limited transportation accessibility, and ride-sharing is more effective in deterring sexual crime in riskier circumstances, such as around alcohol-serving places on weekend nights or when the probability of crime occurrences increases. This study sheds new light on the potential of IT-enabled platforms to improve social well-being beyond their economic contributions and offers a new theoretical insight on the distinct role of digital platforms in public safety.

Keywords: ride-sharing; sharing economy; sexual assault; criminology; routine activity theory; societal impact of information technology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/isre.2020.0978 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orisre:v:32:y:2021:i:2:p:497-516

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Information Systems Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().