Adaptive Optimisation of Ride-Pooling Personalised Fares in a Stochastic Framework
This addresses pricing inefficiencies for ride-pooling operators and travelers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing stochastic optimization methods.
The paper tackles the problem of unknown individual price acceptance in ride-pooling by learning traveler preferences with over 90% accuracy in 10 days, resulting in increased utility for travelers and profit for operators.
Ride-pooling systems, to succeed, must provide an attractive service, namely compensate perceived costs with an appealing price. However, because of a strong heterogeneity in a value-of-time, each traveller has his own acceptable price, unknown to the operator. Here, we show that individual acceptance levels can be learned by the operator (over $90\%$ accuracy for pooled travellers in $10$ days) to optimise personalised fares. We propose an adaptive pricing policy, where every day the operator constructs an offer that progressively meets travellers' expectations and attracts a growing demand. Our results suggest that operators, by learning behavioural traits of individual travellers, may improve performance not only for travellers (increased utility) but also for themselves (increased profit). Moreover, such knowledge allows the operator to remove inefficient pooled rides and focus on attractive and profitable combinations.