Long-term Operation Strategy Analysis Of Ride-hailing Platform Based On Two-sided Market Theory

Nowadays,as a product of the evolution from taxis in the Internet era,the emergence of online taxi has changed the way residents travel,promoted the reform of urban transportation market,and spawned the "Internet + transportation" travel mode.The emergence of online ride-hailing can solve the information asymmetry between riders and drivers,alleviate the problem of "taxi hailing difficulty" in urban travel,fulfill the optimization of resource distribution,improve the rate of employment and travel efficiency.Besides,it alleviates urban traffic congestion to some extent.Therefore,our research on ride-hailing platforms has become a hot topic in operation management in recent years.However,existing studies focus on short-term operations,such as dynamic pricing,and few studies focus on long-term perspective,which is the starting point of this paper.From a long-term perspective,based on the theory of two-sided market,this study focuses on the following five aspects: whether rider will select multiple platforms to travel(i.e.,multi-home riders),whether the driver will select multiple platforms to operation(i.e.,multi-home drivers),proportion of payment the platform paid for a driver,the pricing of rider charged by the platform,as well as whether market is fully covered or partially covered.Then equilibrium analysis is adopted to study these aspects.In this equilibrium,there are two stages of analysis.The first stage is the equilibrium of the pricing and wage payment proportion of the ride-hailing platform,and the second stage is the equilibrium of the participation of riders and drivers,which is analyzed in a reverse order.Through the exploration of different sufficient conditions,that is,the relationship between platform pricing and payment proportion,there exist four different endogenous conditions.Specifically,this study first analyzes the characteristics of single-homing and multiple-homing drivers by deriving the homing choice of drivers endogenously,and then studies the rider market and platform pricing under different homing choices of drivers.The equilibrium analysis in this study includes two parts :(1)under the case where drivers are single-homing,this study discusses the endogenous choice of riders and the endogenous pricing strategy of the platform,the payment proportion of the platform paid for drivers and whether the ride-haling market is fully covered;(2)under the case where drivers are multi-homing,this study discusses the endogenous choice of riders and the endogenous pricing strategy of the platform,the payment proportion of the platform paid for drivers and whether the ride-haling market is fully covered.The results show that there may be multiple participation choices in the endogenous attribution equilibrium,and the homing choice for riders and drivers is closely related to the platform pricing.That is,the numbers of drivers and riders will be affected by the number of participants on the other sides and platform pricing.Based on the results in this study from a long-term perspective,this study provides an analytical basis for the short-term operation of ride-hailing platforms,which helps the sustainable development of ride-hailing platforms and provides a scientific basis for alleviating urban traffic congestion.