Dynamic Pricing and Matching for Two-Sided Queues

TL;DR

This paper develops and analyzes dynamic pricing and matching policies for two-sided queueing systems inspired by gig economy and online marketplaces, establishing optimality rates and demonstrating the effectiveness of max-weight matching strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a fluid approximation based policy and proves its near-optimality, providing new insights into pricing and matching in complex bipartite queueing systems.

Findings

Fluid approximation policy achieves $O( oot{eta})$ optimality rate.

Two-price policy improves to $O( oot{eta^3})$ optimality rate.

Max-weight matching is shown to be optimal within a broad class of policies.

Abstract

Motivated by applications from gig economy and online marketplaces, we study a two-sided queueing system under joint pricing and matching controls. The queueing system is modeled by a bipartite graph, where the vertices represent customer or server types and the edges represent compatible customer-server pairs. Both customers and servers sequentially arrive to the system and join separate queues according to their types. The arrival rates of different types depend on the prices set by the system operator and the expected waiting time. At any point in time, the system operator can choose certain customers to match with compatible servers. The objective is to maximize the long-run average profit for the system. We first propose a fluid approximation based pricing and max-weight matching policy, which achieves an $O(\sqrt{\eta})$ optimality rate when all the arrival rates are scaled by $\eta$. We further show that a two-price and max-weight matching policy achieves an improved $O(\eta^{1/3})$ optimality rate. Under a broad class of pricing policies, we prove that any matching policy has an optimality rate that is lower bounded by $\Omega(\eta^{1/3})$. Thus, the latter policy achieves the optimal rate with respect to $\eta$. We also demonstrate the advantage of max-weight matching with respect to the number of server and customer types $n$. Under a complete resource pooling condition, we show that max-weight matching achieves $O(\sqrt{n})$ and $O(n^{1/3})$ optimality rates for static and two-price policies, respectively, and the latter matches the lower bound $\Omega(n^{1/3})$. In comparison, the randomized matching policy may have an $\Omega(n)$ optimality rate.