# A Unified Representation Framework for Rideshare Marketplace Equilibrium and Efficiency

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified graph-based framework, GEM, to quantify and analyze supply-demand balance and efficiency in rideshare markets, providing new tools for evaluating market equilibrium and improvements.

## Contribution

It develops SD-GEM, a dual-perspective representation of market equilibrium, and proposes statistical tests to measure efficiency and identify underlying factors.

## Key findings

- GEM effectively quantifies supply-demand alignment.
- Dual perspectives reveal disparities in market equilibrium.
- Statistical tests identify factors influencing market efficiency.

## Abstract

Ridesharing platforms are a type of two-sided marketplace where ``supply-demand balance'' is critical for market efficiency and yet is complex to define and analyze. We present a unified analytical framework based on the graph-based equilibrium metric (GEM) for quantifying the supply-demand spatiotemporal state and efficiency of a ridesharing marketplace. GEM was developed as a generalized Wasserstein distance between the supply and demand distributions in a ridesharing market and has been used as an evaluation metric for algorithms expected to improve supply-demand alignment. Building upon GEM, we develop SD-GEM, a dual-perspective (supply- and demand-side) representation of rideshare market equilibrium. We show that there are often disparities between the two views and examine how this dual-view leads to the notion of market efficiency, in which we propose novel statistical tests for capturing improvement and explaining the underlying driving factors.