Title:

Dynamic Stochastic Matching Under Limited Time

Abstract:

In centralized matching markets such as car-pooling platforms and kidney exchange schemes, new participants constantly enter the market and remain available for potential matches during a limited period of time. To reach an efficient allocation, the “timing” of the matching decisions is a critical aspect of the platform’s operations. There is a fundamental trade-off between increasing market thickness and mitigating the risk that participants abandon the market. Nonetheless, the dynamic properties of matching markets have been mostly overlooked in the algorithmic literature.

In this paper, we introduce a general dynamic matching model over edge-weighted graphs, where the agents’ arrivals and abandonments are stochastic and heterogeneous. Our main contribution is to design simple matching algorithms that admit strong worst-case performance guarantees for a broad class of graphs. In contrast, we show that the performance of widely used batching algorithms can be arbitrarily bad on certain graph-theoretic structures motivated by car-pooling services. Our approach involves the development of a host of new techniques, including linear programming benchmarks, value function approximations, and proxies for continuous-time Markov chains, which may be of broader interest. In extensive experiments, we simulate the matching operations of a car-pooling platform using real-world taxi demand data. The newly developed algorithms can significantly improve cost efficiency against batching algorithms.

Biography:

Ali Aouad is an Assistant Professor at the London Business School (UK) since 2018. Ali’s research interests are in the areas of algorithm design, dynamic optimization and stochastic modeling, with application to matching platforms and revenue management systems.  Ali received a PhD in Operations Research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017. Before MIT, he earned an MS in Applied Mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris in 2013. He was born in Meknes, Morocco. 

 

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