  Today's ride-hailing systems experienced significant growth and ride-pooling
promises to allow for efficient and sustainable on-demand transportation.
However, efficient ride-pooling requires a large pool of participating
customers. To increase the customers' willingness for participation, we study a
novel customer-centered pooling (CCP) mechanism, accounting for individual
customers' pooling benefits. We study the benefit of this mechanism from a
customer, fleet operator, and system perspective, and compare it to existing
provider-centered pooling (PCP) mechanisms. We prove that it is individually
rational and weakly dominant for a customer to participate in CCP, but not for
PCP. We substantiate this analysis with complementary numerical studies,
implementing a simulation environment based on real-world data that allows us
to assess both mechanisms' benefit. To this end, we present results for both
pooling mechanisms and show that pooling can benefit all stakeholders in
on-demand transportation. Moreover, we analyze in which cases a CCP mechanism
Pareto dominates a PCP mechanism and show that a mobility service operator
would prefer CCP mechanisms over PCP mechanisms for all price segments.
Simultaneously, CCP mechanisms reduce the overall distance driven in the system
up to 32% compared to not pooling customers. Our results provide decision
support for mobility service operators that want to implement and improve
pooling mechanisms as they allow us to analyze the impact of a CCP and a PCP
mechanism from a holistic perspective. Among others, we show that CCP
mechanisms can lead to a win-win situation for operators and customers while
simultaneously improving system performance and reducing emissions.
