Market Development and Consumer Safety. Risks and Strategies of Passengers on the Market of the Taxi-hailing E-platforms in Russia

In view of the increase in the proportion of the informal taxi market due to decay of the official taxi parks, the problem of quality uncertainty in the taxi market has become quite urgent and risks using taxi services have increased. It involves the issue of consumer interests. The desire to set the market with transparent operations led to emergence of net online mobile taxi-hailing platforms as new player on the market. Due to the reduction of uncertainty it is natural to observe the tendency of actors’ risks decreasing. However there are evidences in the mass media that passengers can face with different risks of services provided. Therefore the key question could be worded as follows: how the taxi market stabilization tendency to reduce uncertainty by controlling through the initiation of mobile platforms has affected perception of actors and creating strategies to reduce them. Thus, the general research perspective is qualitative with conducting semi-structured interviews. The study found that passengers of taxi aggregates can be subjected to 5 types of risks: financial, information risk, threat to life and safety, consumer rights insecurity, and discrepancy of market signals expectations to the reality (including discrimination risk). 2 strategies responding to non-compliance with taxi service quality were revealed – humility and acceptance strategies. Moreover, it was revealed how passengers perceive the service quality in a new taxi market. For passengers, officiality of taxi driver do not mean safer vehicle, they still take care of risks. It forces passengers to create humility strategies and action strategies (reliance on signal markets, direct actions, cooperation) to avoid risks. Despite the introduction of an automated system introduced to make taxi market more transparent, passengers feel the emergence of new risks and quality uncertainty what define their perception of role conflict concerning passengers’ expectations from drivers’ actions.