Joint Pricing and Matching for City-Scale Ride-Pooling

Abstract

Central to efficient ride-pooling are two challenges: (1) how to `price' customers' requests for rides, and (2) if the customer agrees to that price, how to best `match' these requests to drivers. While both of them are interdependent, each challenge's individual complexity has meant that, historically, they have been decoupled and studied individually. This paper creates a framework for batched pricing and matching in which pricing is seen as a meta-level optimisation over different possible matching decisions. Our key contributions are in developing a variant of the revenue-maximizing auction corresponding to the meta-level optimization problem, and then providing a scalable mechanism for computing posted prices. We test our algorithm on real-world data at city-scale and show that our algorithm reliably matches demand to supply across a range of parameters.