Dynamic pricing and matching in ride‐hailing platforms

By Chiwei Yan, Helin Zhu, Nikita Korolko, Dawn B. Woodard. Naval Research Logistics, 2019

325 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ride‐hailing platforms such as Uber, Lyft, and DiDi have achieved explosive growth and reshaped urban transportation. The theory and technologies behind these platforms have become one of the most active research topics in the fields of economics, operations research, computer science, and transportation engineering. In particular, advanced matching and dynamic pricing (DP) algorithms—the two key levers in ride‐hailing—have received tremendous attention from the research community and are continuously being designed and implemented at industrial scales by ride‐hailing platforms. We provide a review of matching and DP techniques in ride‐hailing, and show that they are critical for providing an experience with low waiting time for both riders and drivers. Then we link the two levers together by studying a pool‐matching mechanism called dynamic waiting (DW) that varies rider waiting and walking before dispatch, which is inspired by a recent carpooling product Express Pool from Uber. We show using data from Uber that by jointly optimizing DP and DW, price variability can be mitigated, while increasing capacity utilization, trip throughput, and welfare. We also highlight several key practical challenges and directions of future research from a practitioner's perspective.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Marketing, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a0b062c0b0fbb5a206f27beb893df66ac41085ae

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Automotive Engineering

1. Hai Wang
2. Hai Yang
3. Tom Van Woensel
4. Amanda Stathopoulos

In Marketing

1. Hai Wang
2. Tom Van Woensel
3. Hai Yang
4. Amanda Stathopoulos

In Transportation

1. Hai Wang
2. Hai Yang
3. Satish V. Ukkusuri
4. Tom Van Woensel
5. Amanda Stathopoulos

Citations in the corpus

• Ridesourcing systems: A framework and review (2019, background): “…on multi-rider matching and assignment for shared-taxi and/or ridesplitting systems; see Santos and Xavier (2013), Hosni et al. (2014), Ma et al. (2015), Pelzer et al. (2015), Jung et al. (2016), Alonso-Mora et al. (2017), Qian et al. (2017), Korolko et al. (2018) , and Simonetto et al. (2019) .”
• Supply, demand, operations, and management of crowd-shipping services: A review and empirical evidence (2019, background): “Moreover, Korolko et al. (2018) review matching and dynamic pricing techniques in ride-hailing.”