Seminar (Dept. of General Management)

Title: Competing over Regulatory Entry Barriers: Lobbying by Ridesharing and Taxi Firms

Speaker: Guy Holburn (Ivey Business School)

Time: 10:00am, Mar 14th, (Thursday), 2024

Venue: Room 1008, Mingde Business Building

Language: English

ABSTRACT：

We examine how platform economy entrants and incumbent firms compete through lobbying to shape regulatory entry barriers, arguing that entrants and incumbents target different types of legislators when seeking support for preferred policies. We test our predictions using daily data on lobbying contacts by taxi firms and Uber with councilors in Toronto from 2014-2016 when the council debated ridesharing regulation. A hazard-rate model indicates that taxi firms were more likely to lobby councilors on the licensing committee and the mayor, consistent with an ‘agenda blocking’ strategy. Uber focused its lobbying on councilors who were not committee members, more recently elected, and with more potent pro-competition ideology and the mayor, consistent with a ‘majority building’ strategy. Our findings provide the first statistical analysis of rival firms’ competitive lobbying strategies.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY：

Guy Holburn is a Professor of Business, Economics, and Public Policy at the Ivey Business School. His areas of expertise are strategy, stakeholder management, corporate social responsibility, governance, and regulation, focusing on the energy and utilities sectors. He has published widely in top peer-reviewed academic journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Energy Policy, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. He has authored numerous reports on provincial and federal energy policies and regularly contributes to local and national media. Dr. Holburn is the founder and Director of the Ivey Energy Policy and Management Centre, Canada’s leading university-based center for applied research on energy sector policy. He is also a board member of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability, a member of the Council for Clean and Reliable Energy, and a director of London Hydro, a Canadian utility.