Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

As an innovative transportation strategy, shared mobility addresses traffic congestion, parking scarcity, and climate change by shifting mobility from a vehicle ownership model to service-based operations. Unlike public transit systems, shared mobility platforms operate in a market environment in which a supplier (driver) is free to decide whether to comply with the ride request assigned by the platform. In such a transport mode, drivers' ride acceptance behaviors can significantly influence the performance of a shared mobility platform in terms of riders' waiting time, drivers' occupation rate and idle time, and platform revenue and reputation. The past several years have seen rapidly increased driver ride decline rates, which indicates that the current matching mechanisms are not stable in the sense that drivers often have the incentive to decline assigned ride requests. As such, the long-term objective of this research program is to design stable matching mechanisms for highly dynamic shared mobility systems. Matching stability is a standard requirement in the design of two-sided markets. The economic application of the stable matching theory has been used to guide designs of real-world markets from labor markets to school choice programs, and kidney exchange. However, the classic stable matching theory focuses on finding stable matchings in a static and deterministic setting. Its application to shared mobility faces significant challenges attributable to the highly stochastic, dynamic environment and complex spatiotemporal and socioeconomic constraints of the shared mobility markets. Existing stable matching approaches in the literature are largely restrictive in the sense that they are confined to the boundaries of the oversimplified settings set by the classic stable matching theory. In this research program, we design stable matching mechanisms for shared mobility by modifying and expanding the classic stable matching theory to deliver the features that are required in real shared mobility markets. The outputs of this research can help design matching mechanisms that balance the interests of all stakeholders, promote fairness in ride allocation, foster trust between drivers and the platform, and improve shared mobility service quality. In addition, the methods developed in this program can be general enough to enrich our understanding of the practical market design in the broader context of the sharing economy which is an important enabler of Canada's greener and more innovative future.