Fair Sharing for Sharing Economy Platforms

Como, Italy

Sharing economy platforms, such as Airbnb, Uber or eBay, are an increasingly common way for people to provide their services to earn a living. Yet, the focus in these platforms is either on the satisfaction of the customers of the service, or on boosting successful business transactions. However, recent studies provide a multitude of reasons to worry about the providers in the sharing economy ecosystems. The concerns range from bad working conditions and worker manipulation to discrimination against minorities. This is worsened by the fact that the algorithms used for matching customers and providers, that de facto decide the amount of exposure each provider receives, are proprietary and non-transparent. In this position paper, we propose a novel framework to think about fairness in the matching mechanisms of online sharing economy platforms. Specifically, we focus on various fairness guarantees from the providers’ perspective. Our notion of fairness relies on the idea that, spread over time, all providers should receive the amount of exposure proportional to their relevance or the utility they provide. We postulate that by not requiring every match to be fair, but rather distributing the fairness over time, we can (i) give better guarantees in terms of the overall benefit for the providers and the customers, (ii) make use of implementations from a long line of research concerned with fair division of constrained resources. Overall, our work takes the first step towards rethinking fairness in online sharing economy systems with an additional emphasis on the well-being of providers, and provides insights into parallels with well-established practical implementations in other domains.