Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, 2020.
"Chapter 2 is a joint work with Professor Ricky Roet-Green. Chapter 3 is a joint work with Professor Harry
Groenevelt"--Page xi.
This thesis contains three essays broadly related to topics in revenue management,
service operations, and market design.
In the first essay, we seek to identify conditions under which a ride-sharing
platform such as Uber or Lyft, benefit from offering passengers an option to
share (pool) the ride with fellow passengers. We develop a queueing model
to find the platform’s optimal revenue at equilibrium when passengers are
strategic and drivers are independent agents. We find that offering both solo
and pooled rides is optimal when the distribution of passenger-type is not
skewed and congestion is not high.
In the second essay, we study pricing and quality competition between two
manufacturers under a logit demand model. We find that the optimal myopic
quality does not depend on competition. However, in a dynamic setting, the
optimal quality depends on competition, pace of technological innovation,
and pace of market expansion.
In the third essay, we consider consumer-to-consumer online platforms such as eBay, Airbnb, Uber, etc., that facilitate transactions between users who
are often strangers. We design a matching mechanism to maximize platform’s
profit when users are heterogeneous in their behavior. We argue that in some
cases, the platform can earn higher profit by deliberately allowing users with
a higher probability of being bad to join as well.
