Seminar: Coopetition and Profit Sharing for Ride-sharing Platforms
Date: Aug 25 (Fri), 2017
Time: 3:00pm to 4:00pm
Venue: Room 7-207, 7/F, Lau Ming Wai Academic Building

The introduction of on-demand ride-hailing platforms totally changed the way people commute. In recent years, several firms entered this market to directly compete with traditional taxi companies. Some of these online platforms offer a carpooling service in which several passengers heading in the same direction can share a ride by being efficiently matched to an available vehicle. Examples of such services in NYC include uberPOOL, Lyft Line and Via. Recently, some of these platforms decided to engage in a profit sharing contract with one of their competitors by introducing a new hybrid service. For example, on June 6th, 2017, Via officially announced a partnership with an online NYC taxi platform called Curb. This partnership allows riders to order a taxi (from either platform), and share some portion of the trip with other riders by using Via's efficient matching algorithm. Given that these two platforms are competing with each other, this form of partnership is often referred to as coopetition. This paper is motivated by this specific type of coopetition. We propose to model the problem using a Multinomial Logit (MNL) choice model, and we characterize the equilibrium outcome. Then, we analyze the impact of introducing the new joint service to the market. Interestingly, we show that a properly designed profit sharing contract will benefit both platforms. This result admits a similar win-win outcome as in the supply chain risk sharing contracts literature, even though these two settings are very different. In addition, we show that one can design such a profit sharing contract that will also benefit the drivers and the riders. Consequently, such a coopetition partnership may benefit every single party (riders, drivers and both platforms).

Event Speaker
Dr. Renyu Zhang

Renyu (Philip) Zhang has been an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at New York University Shanghai since August 2016. His research addresses fundamental operations issues under the emerging trends in technology, marketplaces, and society. He is particularly enthusiastic about developing operations and analytics techniques to study problems in the context of social networks, sharing economy, online marketplaces, and sustainability. His research works have appeared in Operations Research and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. Please visit his personal website for more about Philip: https://www.nyu.edu/projects/rzhang/. Before joining NYU Shanghai, Philip obtained his doctoral degree in Operations Management at Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis in May 2016 under the supervision of Professor Nan Yang and Professor Fuqiang Zhang.