Non-Exclusive Notifications for Ride-Hailing at Lyft II: Simulations and Marketplace Analysis

Authors:
  • MGMehdi Golari
    Mehdi Golari
  • RCRomain Camilleri
    Romain Camilleri
  • TJTitouan Jehl
    Titouan Jehl
  • CSChris Sholley
    Chris Sholley
  • MLMatthew Leventi
    Matthew Leventi
  • TCTheresa Calderon
    Theresa Calderon
  • ALAngela Lam
    Angela Lam
  • PDPaul Havard Duclos
    Paul Havard Duclos
  • THTim Holland
    Tim Holland
  • JKJames Koch
    James Koch
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Abstract
Ride-hailing platforms increasingly face uncertain driver acceptance, which makes traditional one-to-one exclusive dispatch (ED) less efficient: rejections and timeouts force sequential retries and lengthen rider wait times, which in turn creates friction in the marketplace. Non-exclusive dispatch (NED) mitigates this friction by broadcasting a request to multiple drivers in parallel. While NED can reduce latency, it introduces new design challenges—most notably, how to choose notification sets and how to resolve driver contention (when multiple drivers accept the same ride). In this paper—the second in a two-part collaboration with Lyft—we develop a theoretically grounded framework to evaluate the long-run performance and marketplace effects of transitioning from ED to NED. We bridge theory and practice by combining (i) an optimization model that formulates NED as a constrained welfare maximization problem with (ii) large-scale discrete-event simulations on proprietary Lyft traces and (iii) a stylized macroscopic equilibrium model. Across simulation and equilibrium analysis, we find that NED improves key fulfillment metrics relative to ED: it reduces match time (and hence rider reneging) while increasing both the number and the average quality of completed matches. We also quantify the speed--quality trade-off between two common contention rules, First-Accept and Best-Accept: First-Accept maximizes speed and throughput, whereas Best-Accept is required to maximize per-match quality. Finally, we show that slightly conservative notification heuristics can improve long-run efficiency by avoiding excessive locking of high-value drivers and preserving future availability.

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