Evolution of Ride Services: From Ride Hailing to Autonomous Vehicles

In recent years, the ride service industry has been evolving rapidly, driven by disruptive technologies such as mobile apps, artificial intelligence, and autonomous vehicles (AVs). Whereas platform-based decentralized ride-hailing (RH) companies have gained significant market share, vertically integrated robotaxi services using emerging AVs are starting to enter the market. In this paper, we aim to provide insights about the evolution and the future of ride services, studying these two competing business approaches. We game-theoretically model and analyze the competition between a platform-based RH firm and an AV-based ride-service firm. Although the AV model has a capacity commitment advantage, we find that, in larger markets with sufficiently patient customers, the RH firm surprisingly gains the upper hand in competition, having higher market share and profits as well as lower service delays and higher prices even if it has a cost disadvantage. Further, entry of the AV firm into a market with an RH monopolist incumbent may reduce total vehicle supply and increase customer wait costs. We also find that, when customers are impatient, the entry of a high-cost AV firm may lead to a decrease in social welfare despite introducing competition, suggesting that regulators should be careful about introduction of robotaxi services in a market if they are not sufficiently cost-efficient. From a broader perspective, our results demonstrate that platform business models may have significant strategic advantages over firms with traditional vertically integrated models under competition, and loss of platforms’ dominance in a market may result in welfare losses. This paper was accepted by Victor Martinez-de-Albeniz, operations management. Funding: This study is partially supported by Korea University Business School Research Grant. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2025.02733 .