Increasing driver flexibility through personalized menus and incentives in ridesharing and crowdsourced delivery platforms

Abstract This article formulates and solves a stochastic optimization model to investigate the impact of crowdsourced platforms (e.g., ridesharing, on‐demand delivery, volunteer food rescue, and carpooling) offering small, personalized menus of requests and incentive offers for drivers to choose from. To circumvent nonlinear variable relationships, we exploit model structure to formulate the program as a stochastic linear integer program. The proposed solution approach models stochastic responses as a sample of variable and fixed scenarios, and to counterbalance solution overfitting, uses a participation ratio parameter. The problem is also decomposed and iterated among two separate subproblems, one which optimizes menus, and another, which optimizes incentives. Computational experiments, based on a ride sharing application using occasional drivers demonstrate the importance of using multiple scenarios to capture stochastic driver behavior. Our method provides robust performance even when discrepancies between predicted and observed driver behaviors exist. Computational results show that offering menus and personalized incentives can significantly increase match rates and platform profit compared to recommending a single request to each driver. Further, compared to the menu‐only model, the average driver income is increased, and more customer requests are matched. By strategically using personalized incentives to prioritize promising matches and to increase drivers' willingness to accept requests, our approach benefits both drivers and customers. Higher incentives are offered when drivers are more likely to accept, while fewer incentives and menu slots are reserved for driver‐request pairs less likely to be accepted.