Equitable and stable matching for a two-sided crowd-shipping market

This study proposes and solves a matching mechanism called Bilateral Equitable and Stable Matching (BESM) that is used to match agents on two sides and ensures not only stable matching results but also more equitable ones. Equity is measured in terms of modified egalitarian cost, side equality cost, and pair equality cost. BESM is then applied to a general two-sided crowdshipping market with a different number of agents on both sides as well as incomplete preference list by any agent. BESM is shown to generate stable and more equitable matching solutions than those in the literature. The resulting benefits are close to the solutions attained by system optimum models.