Differential Pricing Strategies Of Ride-Sharing Platforms: Choosing Customers Or Drivers?

Ride-sharing platforms, such as Uber and Didi Chuxing, widely use differential pricing strategies to encourage platform participation. However, it remains unclear whether differential pricing strategies in ride sharing are reasonable when users care about price fairness. Moreover, platforms face a unique dilemma when considering differential pricing: should it be used for customers, drivers, or both? On the demand side, platforms must deal with taxi competition, while the supply side contends with government regulation; it is this dilemma that motivates our work. Using a stylized model that includes price fairness, market conditions, and government policies, we consider four ride-sharing platform pricing strategies: uniform pricing, differential customer pricing, differential driver pricing, and bilateral differential pricing. We present results from three perspectives. For platforms, we obtain feasible regions in all four pricing strategies. If the maximal number of potential drivers is below certain thresholds, a platform will use differential driver pricing. Conversely, differential customer pricing is optimal when the maximal number of potential drivers is sufficiently large. Moreover, when customers have stronger fairness concerns, platforms tend to use differential driver pricing to reduce competition. From the government perspective, when a platform charges customers differently, the government can achieve a win-win solution for sustainable development and market stability by setting a proper taxi rate. Interestingly, we find that, for the demand and supply sides, an increase in fairness concerns may hurt customers and drivers under certain conditions.