Balancing profit and traveller acceptance in ride-pooling personalised fares

In a ride-pooling system, travellers experience discomfort associated with a detour and a longer travel time, which is compensated with a sharing discount. Most studies assume homogeneous travellers that receive either a flat discount or, in rare cases, a proportional to the inconvenience. This simplified approach offers inaccurate results and leads to an underperforming service when tested against diverse and natural human behaviour. We improve the standard approach on two bases. First, we propose a stochastic setting, where we leverage the population distribution of behavioural traits to determine the acceptance probability. Second, we personalise fares. Each traveller receives a sharing discount based on their contribution to the system such that the operator maximises his expected profitability. In the study, we rigorously prove that the discount optimisation problem can be decomposed. We optimise discounts at a ride level to claim the system optimum. An operator, when proposing fares, encounters two counteracting effects. Low fares increase realisation probability while high fares improve profit from a realised ride. In the personalised discount optimisation, we seek the golden mean. Travellers, who are well-aligned and experience minimal discomfort of sharing, are offered higher fares than those who require more incentive to join the service. Unlike in previous methods, our approach naturally balances the travellers satisfaction and the profit maximisation. With an experiment set in NYC, we show that this leads to significant improvements over the flat discount baseline: the mileage is reduced by 4.5% and the operator generates more profit per mile (over 20% improvement).