150 / 2024-04-22 10:08:10

Stabilizing Cooperation Among Stochastic Arrivals

Cooperative game,Dynamic Collaboration,Pricing

We consider a type of service systems where customers can get served in teams to save cost, such as ride-sharing systems. In such systems, self-interested individuals strategically make their teaming decisions, including joining/leaving a waiting team, forming a new team, or getting served immediately with all team members’ commitment, based on their anticipation of the future. This leads to a complicated stochastic cooperating process where stable teams may not exist due to conflict of customers’ interests. We build an analytical model to study the dynamic cooperating process among stochastic arrivals. By extending the conventional static cooperative game model into a dynamic programming framework, we establish a generic description of the structure of the stable stochastic cooperating process, based on which we derive the optimal incentivizing strategy for the service provider to stabilize the teaming process and to maximize his long-run revenue by charging differentiated service fees. Our model is able to be applied in various service systems such as truck-platooning, goods delivery, and etc.