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

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Park, Jiyong; Pang, Min-Seok; Kim, Junetae; Lee, Byungtae
• 署名单位: University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Greensboro; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); Temple University; National Cancer Center - Korea (NCC); Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)
• 刊物名称: INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7047
• DOI: 10.1287/isre.2020.0978
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 497-516
• 关键词: routine activity theory; criminal victimization; hailing services; crime; police; INEQUALITY; COMPETITION; multilevel; patterns; transit

摘要

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 roilouts 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.