Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Redesigning VolunteerMatch’s search algorithm: toward more equitable access to volunteers
Vahideh Manshadi1, Ken Moon2, Scott Rodilitz3, Daniela Saban4, Akshaya Suresh1
1Yale School of Management; 2Wharton School of Business; 3UCLA Anderson School of Management; 4Stanford Graduate School of Business
To increase equity on their platform, we re-designed the search algorithm on VolunteerMatch (VM), the largest online platform for connecting volunteers and nonprofits. The implementation of our algorithm in Dallas led to a 10.2% increase in the number of different volunteer opportunities that receive a sign-up each week without reducing the total number of sign-ups: a Pareto improvement for VM. A similar effect nationwide would lead to 800 more opportunities with at least one sign-up each week.
Mergers between on-demand service platforms: The impact on consumer surplus and labor welfare
Xiaogang Lin1, Tao Lu2, Xin Wang3
1Guangdong University of Technology; 2University of Connecticut; 3Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
We build a game-theoretical model to analyze the impact of a merger between two platforms on consumer surplus and labor welfare. While a merger reduces competition, the merged platform can pool customers and agents together and improve matching between them; moreover, the merger can amplify the cross-side network effect and thus moderate the merged firm's pricing power. Under a sufficiently strong cross-side network effect, a merger can make merging firms, customers, and agents all better off.
Fairness regulation of prices in competitive markets
