Engaging Drivers in Ride Hailing via Competition: A Case Study with Arena

Sustained work enthusiasms of drivers are crucial for the success of large-scale ride-hailing platforms. In this paper, we conduct the first-of-its-kind exploration to encourage active participation of drivers via competition. We design Arena, a competition where drivers compete for prizes via completing more trips. Through a pilot study covering over 2,600 participants, we uncover the easy-win problem, an overlooked and serious issue in competition design for real-world drivers. It refers to situations where one competitor does not show up during competition whereas the other easily wins. To solve the easy-win problem without impairing motivation of drivers, we devise a novel prediction-based matchmaking framework. On observing that no-shows are highly correlated to the online time of drivers during competition, we propose to identify potential no-shows by predicting drivers' online time and avoid matching potential noshow drivers with drivers that will show up so as to reduce easy-wins. We conduct large-scale experiments based on real competition data involving over 10,000 drivers. The results show that our prediction-based matchmaking scheme can effectively reduce the ratio of easy-wins. © 2021 IEEE.