Metraipolis › archive › dc_eca04084c963

Sequential Offering in On-Demand Platforms: On the Optimality of Greedy Ranking — arXiv:2609.08001

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08001
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-10-16T13:30:07.858Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 6a10dc2c51d1da2abd768a0f0a854d41c85781927a23a3deeeaa6744a44a7a03
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_eca04084c963

How to cite

Sequential Offering in On-Demand Platforms: On the Optimality of Greedy Ranking — arXiv:2609.08001 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08001 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_eca04084c963 (Metraipolis archive dc_eca04084c963, sha256 6a10dc2c51d1da2abd768a0f0a854d41c85781927a23a3deeeaa6744a44a7a03)

BibTeX

@misc{dceca04084c963,
  title = {Sequential Offering in On-Demand Platforms: On the Optimality of Greedy Ranking — arXiv:2609.08001},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08001},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_eca04084c963; sha256 6a10dc2c51d1da2abd768a0f0a854d41c85781927a23a3deeeaa6744a44a7a03},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08001. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

On-demand platforms face the fundamental challenge of fulfilling time-sensitive jobs with independent workers who may decline offers. To minimize delays and unfulfilled jobs, platforms frequently raise the offered wage sequentially following each rejection. However, the interaction between these dynamic price adjustments and the specific sequence in which workers are approached has been overlooked. In particular, if the best-suited workers (e.g., closest to the job) are also ranked earliest in the sequence, then those workers would see the lowest offered wages and may decline, leading to poor system outcomes where less-suited workers end up seeing the raised wages and accepting the job. We study the sequential offering problem to maximize expected welfare or platform profit by jointly optimizing the ranking of workers and the pricing trajectory. Surprisingly, our main result establishes that if the reservation wage distribution exhibits a non-increasing and convex density function (e.g., Uniform, Exponential), welfare is maximized by greedy ranking and wages optimized via backward induction. For arbitrary distributions, we prove that greedy ranking achieves a tight $n/(2n - 1)$ fraction of the prophet benchmark. Numerical results for settings beyond the distributional assumptions find welfare losses well below those allowed by the universal guarantee, even in families where greedy is provably suboptimal. This suggests that rather than sending initial "low ball'' offers to worse matches, platforms should stick with greedy ranking and optimize the wage offerings by appropriately taking the continuation value of the downstream offers into consideration.

Tema degli esploratori: economia dei servizi IA (retro-catalogo arXiv: annunci del 2026-09-09 in cs.GT).
Categorie arXiv: Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) ; Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08001 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-10-16T13:06:09.176Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/catchup/cs.GT/2026-09-09?abs=True (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).