讲座题目：Price, Wage, and Fixed Commission in On-Demand Matching

主讲人：麦克马斯特大学德格鲁特商学院 周筠 副教授

讲座时间：2023年8月15日 （周二） 上午 10:00

讲座地点：江湾楼203福达厅

主办单位：服务科学与服务管理研究中心、运营与供应链研究中心

主持人：中南大学商学院 周雄伟 教授

摘要：

Many on-demand platforms use crowdsourced contractors to meet customer demand for service. For example, ride-hailing platforms such as Uber and Lyft rely on free-lance drivers who decide when and how long to work by themselves. Those platforms set two critical controls, i.e., the price they charge the customers and the wage they pay the service providers, in a centralized and dynamic manner This allows them to balance demand and supply under varying market conditions. Even though both price and wage may be adjusted dynamically as the market condition changes, in practice it is common for platforms to charge a flat, across-the-board commission that applies to all market conditions.

In this paper, we study the price and wage decisions of such a platform and the performance of the fixed commission contract (or FCC in short, measured by the fraction of the optimal expected profit it can achieve). We show that the performance of FCC is determined by the dispersion of the demand and supply elasticities (with respect to the price and wage, respectively) in different market conditions. Further, we provide a lower bound on its performance as a function of those elasticities. In the special case where supply is a concave function of the wage, we show that the best FCC achieves at least 75% of the optimal expected profit. Our theoretical bounds also enable us to evaluate the worst-case performance of the fixed commission contract based on the empirical findings in the economic literature on demand and supply elasticities for ride-hailing services.

We then study several extensions of the model. We consider the model with price-setting suppliers (instead of letting the platform set the price) and the model with long-term committed suppliers (whose surplus is determined by the long-run average earnings across different market conditions). For both models, we show that our main result remains valid. We also consider an extension where the platform maximizes the supply side surplus or the social welfare. We show that when the platform makes an effort to improve the welfare on the supply or demand side, the other side tends to be benefitted as well.

主讲人简介:

周筠，加拿大麦克马斯特大学德格鲁特商学院（DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University）副教授，于2017年获得加拿大多伦多大学运营管理博士学位。近年在Operations Research、Manufacturing and Service Operations Management，Production and Operations Management等国际权威期刊发表学术论文20余篇，多次在国际会议、研讨会作报告，并担任多个国际知名期刊审稿人，分别获得MSOM服务管理SIG最佳论文奖、INFORMS收益管理与定价部分最佳论文奖等奖项。研究兴趣包括：共享经济商业模式、库存管理、收益管理、医疗运营管理、服务运营管理、动态优化问题、数据驱动运营分析。