Each year, Naval Research Logistics awards the Harold W. Kuhn Prize, an award meant to recognize and reward outstanding research published in the journal over the past three years. The Award Committee of Huseyin Topaloglu (chair), Larry Snyder, Alejandro Toriello, Serhan Ziya congratulates the 2021 Kuhn Award Winners, Chiwei Yan, Helin Zhu, Nikita Korolko, and Dawn Woodard for their paper Dynamic pricing and matching in ride-hailing platforms. 

The Committee explained, “In ride-sharing systems, batching ride requests for a certain window before matching them to drivers increases the pool of options available for each driver and helps prevent the so-called wild goose chase, where drivers are matched to riders far from them. Batched matches are, by definition, also a part of passenger pooling services. The present paper studies an equilibrium model for ridesharing with passenger pooling. The levers of the platform are the price and the batching window, where the riders react negatively to increases in either of the two. Using a fluid formulation, the authors establish the existence of a stable equilibrium. Ridesharing systems became an important application area for operations research tools over the last decade. The paper demonstrates the power of stylized models in predicting market behavior and provides a foundational model that other researchers can build on to include other practical considerations in ride-sharing systems.” 

A list of previous winners can be found here.