The Value of Excess Supply in Spatial Matching Markets
Mohammad Akbarpour, Yeganeh Alimohammadi, Shengwu Li, Amin Saberi · Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation · 2022
We study dynamic matching in a spatial setting. Drivers are distributed at random on some interval. Riders arrive in some (possibly adversarial) order at randomly drawn points. The platform observes the location of the drivers and can match newly arrived riders immediately or can wait for more riders to arrive. Unmatched riders incur a waiting cost of c per period. Furthermore, the platform can match riders and drivers irrevocably, and the cost of matching a driver to a rider is equal to the distance between them.