Dynamic pricing in ridesharing platforms

Abstract

We study dynamic pricing policies for ridesharing platforms such as Lyft and Uber. On one hand these platforms are two-sided: this requires economic models that capture the incentives of both drivers and passengers. On the other hand, these platforms support high temporal-resolution for data collection and pricing: this requires stochastic models that capture the dynamics of drivers and passengers in the system. We summarize our main results from [Banerjee et al. 2015], in which we study the role of dynamic pricing in ridesharing platforms using a queueing-theoretic economic model. We build a model of two-sided ridesharing platforms that captures both the stochastic dynamics of the marketplace and the strategic decisions of drivers, passengers and the platform. We show how our model can help explain the success of dynamic pricing in practice: in particular, we argue that the benefit of dynamic pricing over static pricing is not in the optimal performance, but rather, in the robustness of its performance to uncertainty in system parameters.