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A General Framework for Budgeted Threshold Incentives on Request

arXiv 2609.29724 ↗First posted 24 Sep 2026cs.AIcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

On-demand delivery platforms pay riders through incentive activities whose tiers are set from recent completions of riders with a similar history. Operators request such plans for changing periods, rider populations, payment rules and budgets, often for holidays or bad weather, where randomized trials are scarce and take months to collect. We present a request-driven framework that composes four stages (conditional prediction, population reduction, trajectory integration and budget allocation) through seven replaceable modules that exchange conditional trajectory laws, whose award probabilities and award-marked moments give payment and uplift for any activity rule. A response-correction step reweights trajectories from abundant no-offer history to match the moments of a short pilot. We prove that, on a fixed plan menu and given the stage errors, the end-to-end value loss is bounded by the sum of four stage terms, and that for every stage there are instances on which omitting it leaves an error floor the others cannot remove. On 3,000 riders over 45 weekly origins, all 127 windows of a week are answered 11.04x faster with identical scenarios and at most 0.92% value lost by the allocation. On 24 new controlled response laws, the response correction with a one-week pilot lowers regret by 51.2% relative to a trial with the same nominal randomized rider-weeks, and a four-week pilot with exact summation comes within +0.007 of an 18-week trial. In registered studies where windows, populations, rules and binding budgets change from request to request, the framework's regret is below that of a trial with the same nominal rider-weeks and below dose interpolation of the same pilot data, and reusing its one-off preparation answers 60 requests 14.1x and 2.70x faster with identical answers. Against a nine-offer trial fitted with the framework's own dose curve, one-week regret is 0.055 lower.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 16 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2026.

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References · 16

  1. 2015Parallelizing the dual revised simplex methodcited by 89
  2. 2018Removing Hidden Confounding by Experimental Groundingcited by 64
  3. 2019A Unified Framework for Marketing Budget Allocationcited by 33
  4. 2020Using Experiments to Correct for Selection in Observational Studiescited by 28
  5. 2013Uncertainty Quantification in Complex Simulation Models Using Ensemble Copula Couplingcited by 22
  6. 2021E-Commerce Promotions Personalization via Online Multiple-Choice Knapsack with Uplift Modelingcited by 21
  7. 2022LBCF: A Large-Scale Budget-Constrained Causal Forest Algorithmcited by 17
  8. 2024End-to-End Cost-Effective Incentive Recommendation under Budget Constraint with Uplift Modelingcited by 10
  9. 2024Decision Focused Causal Learning for Direct Counterfactual Marketing Optimizationcited by 9
  10. 2022A Framework for Multi-stage Bonus Allocation in meal delivery Platformcited by 4
  11. 2024Practical Marketplace Optimization at Uber Using Causally-Informed Machine Learningcited by 3
  12. 2025Bi-Level Decision-Focused Causal Learning for Large-Scale Marketing Optimization: Bridging Observational and Experimental Datacited by 2
4 more
  1. 2025MMCE: A Framework for Deep Monotonic Modeling of Multiple Causal Effectscited by 1
  2. 2026Jointly Optimizing Debiased CTR and Uplift for Coupons Marketing: A Unified Causal Frameworkcited by 1
  3. 2026D3-Subsidy: Online and Sequential Driver Subsidy Decision-Making for Large-Scale Ride-Hailing Marketcited by 1
  4. 2026Large-Scale Trade-Off Curve Computation for Incentive Allocation with Cardinality and Matroid Constraintscited by 1

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