he question arises as to what kind of individuals benefitfrom the introduction of ridesharing.Smith(2016) provides some survey evidence on this issue. In 2015, the Pew Research Center surveyed 4,787 adult Americans on issues related to the digital economy. Part of the survey was focused on ridesharing. The survey found three interesting statistics:(i) about 15% of Americans use ridesharing apps, but one-third do not know about these services; (ii)the use of ridesharing platforms is more popular among young adults who live in urban areas who are well educated; and (iii) frequent users of ridesharing services are less likely

They estimate that Uber’s basic ride service (UberX) generated about $2.9 billion in consumer surplus for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2015(in 2015 dollars). Extended to the country as a whole, the authors estimate that consumer surplus gains would be about $6.8 billion. This consumer surplus value is larger than the current annual revenues of Uber worldwide, anddoes not include the benefits

Uber has attracted dramatically increased the number of new “driver-partners” for the basic ridesharing service, from fewer than 1,000 in January 2013 to almost 40,000 new drivers starting in December 2014 (Hall and Krueger, 2015).5Currently, more than half of American adults have heard of ridesharing apps like Uber and Lyft, with 15% actuallyusingthe services (Smith, 2016). In China, Didi facilitates 7 million rides per day (Floyd, 2016)