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arXiv · 2603.21531

Non-Exclusive Notifications for Ride-Hailing at Lyft II: Simulations and Marketplace Analysis

Farbod Ekbatani·Rad Niazadeh·Mehdi Golari·Romain Camilleri·Titouan Jehl·Chris Sholley·Matthew Leventi·Theresa Calderon·Angela Lam·Paul Havard Duclos·Tim Holland·James Koch·Shreya Reddy
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Abstract

Ride-hailing platforms increasingly face uncertain driver acceptance, which makes traditional one-to-one 'exclusive dispatch (ED)' less efficient: rejections and timeouts force sequential retries and lengthen rider wait times, which in turn creates friction in the marketplace. 'Non-exclusive dispatch (NED)' mitigates this friction by broadcasting a request to multiple drivers in parallel. While NED can reduce latency, it introduces new design challenges -- most notably, how to choose notification sets and how to resolve driver contention (when multiple drivers accept the same ride). In this paper -- the second in a two-part collaboration with Lyft -- we develop a theoretically grounded framework to evaluate the long-run performance and marketplace effects of transitioning from ED to NED. We bridge theory and practice by combining (i) an optimization model that formulates NED as a constrained welfare maximization problem with (ii) large-scale discrete-event simulations on proprietary Lyft traces and (iii) a stylized macroscopic equilibrium model. Across simulation and equilibrium analysis, we find that NED improves key fulfillment metrics relative to ED: it reduces match time (and hence rider reneging) while increasing both the number and the average quality of completed matches. We also quantify the speed--quality trade-off between two common contention resolution rules, 'First-Accept' and 'Best-Accept': First-Accept maximizes speed and throughput, whereas Best-Accept is required to maximize per-match quality. Finally, we show that slightly conservative notification heuristics can improve long-run efficiency by avoiding excessive locking of high-value drivers and preserving future availability.

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Farbod Ekbatani, Rad Niazadeh, Mehdi Golari, Romain Camilleri, Titouan Jehl, Chris Sholley, Matthew Leventi, Theresa Calderon, Angela Lam, Paul Havard Duclos, Tim Holland, James Koch, Shreya Reddy. 2026-03-23. Non-Exclusive Notifications for Ride-Hailing at Lyft II: Simulations and Marketplace Analysis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21531

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