Latest (2018) NYC Research on User Multihoming in Rideshare Market

Customers’ Multihoming Behavior in Ride-Hailing: Empirical Evidence from Uber and Lyft Chitla, Sandeep and Jagabathula, Srikanth and Mitrofanov, Dmitry and Cohen, Maxime C. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4591826 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4591826 The author collected data from 1.4M rides, 162k riders, NYC, 2018 through aelf-selected third-party panel. Uber consists of 65.7% of rides. Over a full year, 56.7% of riders used only Uber, 26.7% only Lyft, 16.6% used both at least once. The paper used subsample of the multihoming riders to estimate a structural choice model with Bayesian price/wait-time learning and a search-cost-driven consideration stage. The finding: only 16.6% of riders ever used both platforms, and even they checked both apps just 43.4% of the time — inertia and brand affinity, not price or wait time, dominate the choice. ...

July 28, 2026 · Ariana Tang

New Euros Bill Design has Beethoven, I hope it Win

Disclaimer: I don’t owe IP rights of any design images. My taste is personal and they’re for academic purposes only. My favourite design (though Beethoven should have been used for a 5 or 9 euro bill): This image is part of design proposal E, created by Myrsini Vardopoulou, and has been shortlisted by the ECB as a potential design for the third euro banknote series. (European Central Bank) ...

July 27, 2026 · Ariana Tang

China Fines Ctrip (Trip.com Group) for Antitrust Violations

🍳 Source: State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) penalty decision (2026) No. 29, July 25, 2026. New Economists https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ECujo_6Qt_CbJanZvB6EUw SAMR found Ctrip Group abused its dominant position in China’s online hotel booking platform market (China-only relevant market). Market dominance evidence: Market share consistently above 50% (GMV basis: 53–59% over 2020–2025) Highly concentrated market: HHI ~4,100–4,575; CR3 ~94–95 Strong control over pricing, traffic allocation, room inventory, and hotel sales channels The fouls: ...

July 26, 2026 · Ariana Tang

Paper reading note | Will the market fix the market?

Proabably not? A Theory of Stock Exchange Competition and Innovation: Will the Market Fix the Market? Budish, Lee and Shim (2024) JPE Reading Notes Context: exchanges today adopt the continuous limit order book trading mechanism, which generates latency arbitrage — rents from symmetrically disseminated public information — which fuels a socially wasteful speed race and taxes liquidity. A known fix exists (frequent batch auctions). Incumbent exchanges have not adopted it. Why not? ...

July 24, 2026 · Ariana Tang

(One of) the 2026 Fields Medals

U of Chicago got another Fields Medal! The medalist videos are especially inspiring to watch: How deliberately the anime dolls face the camera is adorable. Inspiring mathematicians: “Mathematics is the queen of the sciences, and arithmetic is the queen of mathematics." —— Carl Friedrich Gauss “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty." —— Bertrand Russell “The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom." —— Georg Cantor ...

July 23, 2026 · Ariana Tang

Where should I buy a macbook?

International students or frequent traveller would often take advantage of doing large purchases in the cheapest airport. But more importantly, exchange rates is an important financial lever. Recent interesting story from the Economist: A new Plaza for global currencies wouldn’t work https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/06/30/a-new-plaza-accord-for-global-currencies-wouldnt-work Just being curious, so a quick Google tells me: exchange rate is the price of currencies so technically it should also follow the supply and demand rule. Different mechanism operates in different time magnitude: ...

July 22, 2026 · Ariana Tang

Ted Talk Parody

Viewing from the bad side: every expert might have been just a babbling equilibrium. On the good side, we can all be the expert:

July 21, 2026 · Ariana Tang

Algorithmic Price Fixing

There’s the theory that with perfect competition and perfect information, in a standard one item model, seller would set price = marginal cost and social surplus is going to be maximized. A similar intuition explained using general equilibrium has been given in an Arrow paper. But nothing is perfect, right? I think the story is quite simple, though not necessarily true: a large selling platform can use its market power to force sellers equate their price across channels. But because the platform charges a large comission rate, sellers would have to raise price uniformly on other cheaper channels too. ...

July 20, 2026 · Ariana Tang

The World Cup Final with a HALFTIME Show?!

Today is the world cup final. I will be watching it from the air :( This year’s world cup comes with a complementary halftime show Why the World Cup half-time show may be a taste of things to come Annabel Rackham, BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyr498vqqpo Half-time at a football game is normally a chance to grab a drink or snack, make a mad dash for the toilets or vent with friends about some questionable refereeing or defending. ...

July 19, 2026 · Ariana Tang

beethoven's first, or haydn with the volume up

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major (Op. 21) premiered in Vienna in 1800, when he was pushing thirty and already a known quantity as a pianist. It’s a perfectly nice symphony. That’s kind of the problem. You put it on expecting Beethoven and you get Haydn — sunny C major, the same tidy phrases, and with wind-up-the-clock development. Which makes sense: Haydn was his teacher, Mozart was in the air, and this is Beethoven doing the assignment very, very well. ...

July 18, 2026 · Ariana Tang