Notice of RetractionThe Heterogeneity of Taxi Service and Its Hedonic Pricing

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

In most big cities in China, taxi tariffs are very complex, characterized as two-part tariff, mainly measured and charged by distance. Other quality characteristics (QCs) are not priced or priced but not enough. This causes some conflicts between passengers and drivers. Based upon hedonic approach, this article argues that taxi services are so heterogeneous in many QCs that could not be measured and charged on distance alone. If so, it is a bundled service including many unvalued QCs, and becomes a kind of nonmarket resource. By a simple model, the short run welfare implication in different tariff structures are analyzed, where QCs are ignored, or measured and charged by themselves, or by distance. The incentive rules may be opposite, depending on the QCs are economic goods or bads.