The Limit of Money in Daily Ridesharing: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Rural France

Ridesharing has been a growing sector in recent years under the trend of the sharing economy. It has the potential to solve environmental and societal challenges related to daily transportation. The difficulty in developing ridesharing practice is to motivate drivers and passengers to use. Understanding their motivations could help. We conduct a field experiment with a French ridesharing start-up to understand drivers’ motivations. More specifically, we would like to measure whether a higher monetary incentive would have motivation crowding effects. We hire subjects to make ridesharing requests as passengers. Drivers see the requests on their road and decide in real-time whether or not to stop. Upon each request, we randomly show 3 euros or 7 euros to drivers. After the trip, drivers can decide whether or not to redeem the gain, and if they do, we invite them to split the gain between themselves and a charity. We collect 128 observations in summer 2017. The results show that drivers behave the same and have similar motivation profiles under 3-euro and 7- euro groups. Increasing monetary incentive level has neither a crowding-out nor a crowding-in effect. Our results offer policy insights to ridesharing practitioners. Instead of only focusing on monetary incentives, they could think of strategies that trigger intrinsic motivations to increase participation with equal or less budget.