Opponent-aware Order Pricing towards Hub-oriented Mobility Services

Hub-oriented mobility services have gained great developments in recent years, enabling riders to simultaneously call vehicles from multiple mobility-supply companies (agents) on a single APP (which we call "hub"). Competing with others on such a hub, to obtain an order, an agent company first needs to get admitted by the requester, which is in turn affected by its quotation. The quotation needs to be attractively low compared to those of the opposing agents. Thus, an opponent-aware pricing strategy is needed for an agent to play well in the hub scenario, which is rarely discussed in existing works. To address the aforementioned issue, in this work, we first propose a quotation prediction model, which employs a neural network with a customized loss function to predict the opponents’ quotations. Based on the predictions, we then propose multi-arm bandit based methods to decide a proper quotation for the agent, in order to obtain orders while retaining profits. We finally conduct extensive experiments on real data, where the quotation-determining method integrated with the prediction model has achieved a remarkable profit improvement up to 85.5% compared to baseline methods, demonstrating their effectiveness.