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Do Driving Apps Promote Safe Driving? An Empirical Analysis Using Sensor Data

Driving apps have proliferated in the market, for the purpose of collecting personal driving information. Amid the public’s concern about privacy protection, developers often market these apps as helpful tools for safe driving, sometimes by incorporating reward programs. In this research, we examine app developers’ marketing offers using device-tracking data from a Chinese tech start-up. We find that the app improves driving only when the reward incentive is significantly high. The driving improvement in our context is comparable to that found in other usage-based insurance studies. When the incentive drops, users react by dramatically reducing driving quality. However, the improvement is hardly sustainable, with the analysis revealing that it is mainly driven by reward saturation due to the daily realization of small rewards. When the incentive is low, users show little improvement after the initial period, followed by a continuous deterioration in driving quality due to the mere monitoring effect. Consumer heterogeneity moderates the effect. Users with high incomes and living in a congested city are less sensitive to the reward.