Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

8-2022

Abstract

In centralized matching markets such as carpooling platforms and kidney exchange schemes, new participants constantly enter the market and remain available for potential matches during a limited period of time. To reach an efficient allocation, the "timing"of the matching decisions is a critical aspect of the platform's operations. There is a fundamental tradeoff between increasing market thickness and mitigating the risk that participants abandon the market. Nonetheless, the dynamic properties of matching markets have been mostly overlooked in the algorithmic literature. In this paper, we introduce a general dynamic matching model over edge-weighted graphs, where the agents' arrivals and abandonments are stochastic and heterogeneous. Our main contribution is to design simple matching algorithms that admit strong worst-case performance guarantees for a broad class of graphs. In contrast, we show that the performance of widely used batching algorithms can be arbitrarily bad on certain graph-theoretic structures motivated by carpooling services. Our approach involves the development of a host of new techniques, including linear programming benchmarks, value function approximations, and proxies for continuous-time Markov chains, which may be of broader interest. In extensive experiments, we simulate the matching operations of a car-pooling platform using real-world taxi demand data. The newly developed algorithms can significantly improve cost efficiency against batching algorithms.

Keywords

approximation algorithms, car-pooling, dynamic matching, Markov decision processes

Discipline

Operations and Supply Chain Management | Transportation

Research Areas

Operations Management

Publication

Operations Research

Volume

70

Issue

4

First Page

2349

Last Page

2383

ISSN

0030-364X

Identifier

10.1287/opre.2022.2293

Publisher

Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2293

Download

Share

COinS