Seminar （Dept. of Marketing）

Theme：Do Driving Apps Promote Safe Driving? An Empirical Analysis Using Sensor Data

Speaker：Yitian (Sky) Liang（Tsinghua University）

Time：2021-05-27 10:00

Address：Room 1007, Mingde Business Building

Language：Chinese/English

Abstract：

Driving apps have proliferated in the market, for the purpose of collecting personal driving information. Amid the public’s concern about privacy protection, developers often market these apps as helpful tools for safe driving, sometimes by incorporating reward programs. In this research, we examine app developers’ marketing offers using device-tracking data from a Chinese tech start-up. We find that the app improves driving only when the reward incentive is significantly high. The driving improvement in our context is comparable to that found in other usage-based insurance studies. When the incentive drops, users react by dramatically reducing driving quality. However, the improvement is hardly sustainable, with the analysis revealing that it is mainly driven by reward saturation due to the daily realization of small rewards. When the incentive is low, users show little improvement after the initial period, followed by a continuous deterioration in driving quality due to the mere monitoring effect. Consumer heterogeneity moderates the effect. Users with high incomes and living in a congested city are less sensitive to the reward.

Short biography：

Yitian (Sky) Liang is Associate Professor (without tenure) of Marketing at the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University. He obtained his Master of Statistics at UBC in 2011 and Ph.D. in Business Administration at UBC in 2017. His primary research area is quantitative marketing with applications in pricing, online video games, digital advertising, online charity and consumer app usage. He also conducts research in collaboration with consumer behavior researchers in topics such as sleepiness and parental motivation. His research has been published at Journal of Marketing Research and Management Science.