Dynamic Car Dispatching and Pricing: Revenue and Fairness for Ridesharing Platforms

Dynamic Car Dispatching and Pricing: Revenue and Fairness for Ridesharing Platforms

Zishuo Zhao, Xi Chen, Xuefeng Zhang, Yuan Zhou

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4701-4708. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/652

A major challenge for ridesharing platforms is to guarantee profit and fairness simultaneously, especially in the presence of misaligned incentives of drivers and riders. We focus on the dispatching-pricing problem to maximize the total revenue while keeping both drivers and riders satisfied. We study the computational complexity of the problem, provide a novel two-phased pricing solution with revenue and fairness guarantees, extend it to stochastic settings and develop a dynamic (a.k.a., learning-while-doing) algorithm that actively collects data to learn the demand distribution during the scheduling process. We also conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms.
Keywords:
Planning and Scheduling: Planning Algorithms
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Mechanism Design
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: Fairness & Diversity
Planning and Scheduling: Planning under Uncertainty
Planning and Scheduling: Planning with Incomplete Information