关键词: 聚合型平台, 网约车公司, 博弈定价

Abstract: In the past few years, a ride-hailing company has greatly affected the way people travel. In the ride-hailing market, companies compete with each other. Although competition can prevent the emergence of the oligopolies, it can also lead to market fragmentation. This is mainly due to the low efficiency of the matching between the scattered demand in the market and the supply of many ride-hailing companies. Recently, the aggregated ride-hailing platform was proposed to help solve the fragmentation of the ride-hailing market. The aggregated ride-hailing platform integrates multiple ride-hailing companies to provide services for passengers. The development of the ride hailing market in the aggregation model has become a hot topic of social attention, and also provides a new perspective for studying the development theory of ride hailing in the Internet sharing economy. How to reasonably price to realize the stable operation of the ride-hailing market is the key to the development of the aggregated platform.
This paper establishes a multi-party game model between ride-hailing companies on the aggregated platform and passengers to provide corresponding theoretical guidance for the pricing of ride-hailing companies. We construct models separately in the cases where the number of idle vehicles is exogenous and endogenous variables. In the case where the number of idle vehicles is an exogenous variable, we construct the corresponding game model among the ride-hailing companies and passengers, and give the closed-form Nash equilibrium solution. When the number of idle vehicles is an endogenous variable, we construct the corresponding game model among the ride-hailing companies and passengers and try to get expected revenue of the two riding-hailing companies through an iterative method, and then obtain the corresponding response curve and Nash equilibrium solution. Through an analysis of the solution, we find that participating in the aggregated platforms is beneficial for ride hailing companies when the commission rate is small, as it can generate more expected benefits, especially for small ride hailing companies. As the number of occupied vehicles increase and the demand increases, the number of idle vehicles for both ride hailing companies will decrease, and both companies will increase their prices. However, ride hailing companies with a larger total number of vehicles still have a higher number of idle vehicles, so the pricing of larger ride hailing companies is still higher than that of smaller ride hailing companies. The increase in the number of occupied vehicles has made vehicles scarcer and scarcer, and the price of both companies will also increase more, resulting in an increase in overall revenue.
Our above analysis is based on the situation where ride hailing companies can meet the needs of passengers. In the future, we can consider situations, where passengers’ needs cannot be met, and the Stackelberg game between the company and customer. In addition, aggregated ride hailing platforms and drivers from ride hailing companies can also participate in the game and design more complex game models for analysis. In the practice of operating ride hailing platforms, it is also influenced by various factors, such as the different ownership structures of drivers and passengers, the differences in target customers between aggregation platforms, and the diversification of subsidy strategies. Meanwhile, in recent years, the ride hailing industry has entered an era of strong regulation, and the intervention of government regulation will inevitably cause a significant change in the balance of the ride hailing market. Considering these factors, the pricing issue in the ride hailing market is a hot topic and will be a further research direction in the future.

Key words: aggregated platform, ride-hailing companies, game pricing