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Cake day: June 20th, 2023
  • harshvoldy@lemmy.worldtoHacker News@lemmy.smeargle.fans•The Drivers Cooperative: New York’s driver-owned ride-hailing app
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    1 year ago

    The issue with this is going to be implementation of market clearing algorithms for supply demand matching, surge pricing, etc. Unfortunately, these are big open research areas from both computer science and economics dimensions. Uber has enormous headstart and they have heavily invested in developing both aspects.

    Is there a way to develop algorithms that truly maximize social welfare, instead of corporate profits? Yes. Is it going to be possible to attract open source academic talent that can develop these algorithms, and then attract the engineering talent to develop such low latency infrastructure? Doubtful. Even if algorithms can be figured out, this is a very compute heavy application where it would be difficult to compete with a company like Uber in terms of service quality when they can throw enormous amount of resources to shave off milliseconds in response times.

    Source: My doctoral thesis is on matching algorithms in ride share industry that maximize social welfare.