We would like to invite you to participate in Management Engineering(ME) Seminar.

1. When: November 19th (Monday), 16:00~17:20
2. Where: Building 9, 7th #9701
3. Speaker: Jyyong Park (PhD candidate, KAIST)
4. Topic: The Deterrent Effect of Ride-Sharing on Sexual Assault and Investigation of Situational Contingencies
5. Research field: IT Management
* Lecture will be delivered in English.

Abstract:
Sexual assault is one of the most repellant and costliest crimes, which inflicts irrecoverable harms to victims. This study examines the effect of IT-enabled ride-sharing platforms on sexual assaults. Drawing upon routine activity theory from the criminology literature, we posit that ride-sharing can (i) reduce a passenger’s risk of being a suitable target and (ii) serve as a capable guardian that deters sexual assaults. Using comprehensive data from New York City, we investigate the relationship between Uber transactions and rape incidents in 2015. For our identification strategy, we adopt public events permitted by the city and local air pollution as instrumental variables. Our findings show that the number of Uber pickups is negatively associated with the likelihood of rape occurrences. We also find that ride-sharing contributes to a more significant reduction in rape in taxi-sparse areas than in taxi-dense areas, implying that it reduces the target’s exposure to sexual violence to a greater extent when fewer alternatives for transportation are available. Furthermore, we delve deeper into situational contingencies, demonstrating that ride-sharing is more effective in deterring crime occurrence under riskier circumstances such as around alcohol-serving places at weekend nights. This study sheds new light on the potential of IT-enabled platforms to improve social well-being beyond its economic contributions and offers a new theoretical insight on the district roles of digital platforms in crime deterrence.