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arXiv · 2603.21533

Non-Exclusive Notifications for Ride-Hailing at Lyft I: Single-Cycle Approximation Algorithms

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 rely on non-exclusive notifications-broadcasting a single request to multiple drivers simultaneously-to mitigate inefficiencies caused by uncertain driver acceptance. In this paper, the first in a two-part collaboration with Lyft, we formally model the 'Notification Set Selection Problem' for a single decision cycle, where the platform determines the optimal subset of drivers to notify for each incoming ride request. We analyze this combinatorial optimization problem under two contention-resolution protocols: 'First Acceptance (FA)', which prioritizes speed by assigning the ride to the first responder, and 'Best Acceptance (BA)', which prioritizes match quality by selecting the highest-valued accepting driver. We show that welfare maximization under both mechanisms is strongly NP-hard, ruling out a Fully Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (FPTAS). Despite this, we derive several positive algorithmic results. For FA, we present a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for the single-rider case and a constant-factor approximation (factor 4) for the general matching setting. We highlight that the FA valuation function can be viewed as a novel discrete choice model with theoretical properties of independent interest. For BA, we prove that the objective is monotone and submodular, admitting a standard $(1 - 1/e)$-approximation. Moreover, using a polynomial-time demand oracle that we design for this problem, we show it is possible to surpass the $(1 - 1/e)$ barrier. Finally, in the special case of homogeneous acceptance probabilities, we show that the BA problem can be solved exactly in polynomial time via a linear programming formulation. We validate the empirical performance our algorithms through numerical experiments on synthetic data and on instances calibrated using real ride-sharing data from Lyft.

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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 I: Single-Cycle Approximation Algorithms. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21533

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