主讲人：唐曲（暨南大学）

题目：Crowding in the Public Transit

主持人：邢剑炜（北京大学国家发展研究院）

时间：2025年6月6日（周五）上午10:30-12:00

地点：承泽园132教室

摘要：

Crowding is a common disamenity that exists in many settings, but little is known about the disutility from crowding. This paper estimates the willingness-to-pay (WTP) to avoid crowding in public transportation with a revealed preference framework. We leverage an off-peak pricing discontinuity in the Beijing Subway that generates exogenous variation in price over time. Passengers traveling between a pair of stations choose the optimal departure time, trading off between the price, the expected level of crowding, and the deviation from the ideal time of travel. We devise a novel approach to allocate passengers to trains and calculate real-time crowding. Crowding is correlated with unobserved demand shocks that make traveling in a station pair at a specific time particularly appealing. To address the endogeneity in crowding, we construct an instrumental variable based on the number of overlapping trips that start from and end in different stations and are thus driven by plausibly unrelated demand shocks. We estimate the marginal WTP to reduce in-train crowding by one passenger per square meter to be 2 cents RMB per minute, or about 1 RMB for a typical 40-minute subway ride. High-income passengers are less price sensitive and have a higher WTP to avoid crowding.

主讲人介绍：

Qu Tang is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Jinan University. She received her PhD in Agriculture and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Qu Tang works on environmental and resource economics, with a particular interest in empirical research on understanding the effects of and adaptation to climate change and air pollution, as well as the environmental consequences of local economic policies. She also conducts research in urban economics, focusing on how fare structures affect user behavior and determine the efficiency, externality, and welfare impacts of the public transit system. Her work has been published in leading journals such as Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and American Journal of Agricultural Economics.