Auction-based Order Dispatch and Pricing in Ridesharing

Ridesharing plays a more and more important role in modern transport. In this paper, we propose solutions for the bonus-offering scenario of ridesharing platforms (service providers). When vehicles are in shortage, requesters are allowed to offer bonus so that their orders can get prioritized in the dispatch process. To enable self-motivated bonus bidding of requesters, we devise an auction mechanism, where requesters are supposed to submit their bids truthfully and the platform conducts order dispatch and pricing. Our goal is to maximize the overall utility of the auction, while ensuring desirable auction properties such as truthfulness and individual rationality. To realize that, we propose a greedy and a ranking approach for order dispatch and their corresponding pricing strategies. Extensive experiments on real data suggest that the ranking approach is both effective and efficient.