How did you like this ride? An analysis of user preferences in ridesharing assignments

Ridesharing can significantly reduce individual passenger transport and thus greenhouse gas emissions generated by traffic. Although ridesharing offers great potential, it is not yet popular enough to be seen as an important contribution to solving the aforementioned problems. Our hypothesis suggests that we need to make the assignment mechanism of ridesharing systems more human-centric and comprehensible in order to popularise ridesharing. Therefore, we investigate factors that influence the choice of users and their satisfaction with the assigned ride. Most of today's ridesharing assignment algorithms focus solely on features such as time, distance and price. Contrarily, this paper examines additional factors that influence customer decisions to increase their satisfaction. Therefore, we first conduct a literature study to identify previous preferences relevant for ridesharing from a research perspective. Subsequently, we extract the relevant preferences for an assignment process. From these we secondly conduct a survey. Last, we analyse the obtained survey data and order the preferences based on their importance for participants overall and among demographic subgroups.