讲座主题：We Are on the Way: Analysis of On-Demand Ride-Hailing Systems

　　主讲人：孔广文 助理教授 明尼苏达大学(双城)

　　讲座地点：经济与管理学院 B129

　　讲座时间：2019年7月25日，10:00--11:30

　　摘要：Recently, there has been a rapid rise of on-demand ride-hailing platforms, such as Uber and Didi, which allow passengers with smart phones to submit trip requests and match them to drivers based on their locations and drivers' availability. This increased demand has raised questions about how such a new matching mechanism will affect the efficiency of the transportation system, in particular, whether it will help reduce passengers' average waiting time compared to traditional street-hailing systems. We shed light on this question by building a stylized model of a circular road and comparing the average waiting times of passengers under various matching mechanisms. We discover the inefficiency in the on-demand ride-hailing system when the en route time is long, whichmay result in non-monotonicity of passengers' average waiting time as passenger arrival rate increases. After identifying key tradeoffs between different mechanisms, we find that the on-demand matching mechanism could result in lower efficiency than the traditional street-hailing mechanism when the system utilization level is medium and the road length is long. To overcome the disadvantage of both systems, we further propose adding response caps to the on-demand ride-hailing mechanism and develop a heuristic method to calculate a near-optimal cap. We also examine the impact of passenger abandonments, idle time strategies of taxis and traffic congestion on the performance of the ride-hailing systems. The results of this research would be instrumental for understanding the tradeoffs of the new service paradigm and thus enable policy makers to make more informed decisions when enacting regulations for this emerging service paradigm.

　　主讲人简介:Guangwen Kong is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, the University of Minnesota. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Operations Management from the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. Her interests are strategic interactions and behavioral decision making in the area of Supply Chain Management, Service Operations, and Business Model Innovation such as Sharing Economy and On-demand Platforms. She has been working on projects in peer to peer product sharing, online promotion, on-demand service platform, service contracts design and supply chain contracts. She has published papers in Management Science and Production and Operations Management, served as Editorial Review Board member of Production and Operations Management, and reviewer of Operations Research, European Journal of Operational Research, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Journal of Management Studies, Production and Operations Management and Naval Research Logistics. Her work has received several awards, including 2018 INFORMS Service Science Cluster Best Paper Award (Finalist), 2018 POMS College of Behavior in Operations Management Junior Scholar Award (Finalist), 2018 The NET Institute Summer Grant Award, 2017 CSAMSE Annual Conferences Best Paper Award (Honorable mentions), 2011 POMS College of Supply Chain Best Student Paper Award (Finalist), and 2016 POMS-HK Best Student Paper Award (Finalist). She is ranked as the top 10% of Authors on SSRN by all-time downloads.