How much is trust: The cost and benefit of ridesharing with friends

Abstract

Ridesharing with social contacts (i.e., ‘friends’) is substantially more accepted than with strangers. However, limiting ridesharing to friends while rejecting strangers also reduces ride choices and increases detour costs. This work studies, from a theoretical perspective, whether the additional detour costs of limiting shared rides to social network contacts would be prohibitive. It proposes a social network based ridesharing algorithm with heterogeneous detour tolerances for varied social contacts. The theoretical matching rates and detour costs are compared in a simulation for three levels of social connectivity: travelling with direct contacts only, with direct and indirect contacts, or..