You are a data scientist at a ride-hailing marketplace. Answer the following case prompts as if you were advising product, operations, and marketplace leadership.
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High-risk drop-off warning for drivers
: The company wants to introduce an in-app prompt that tells drivers whether a passenger's drop-off area is considered a high-risk neighborhood. How would you evaluate this feature experimentally? What business, safety, marketplace, and fairness impacts would you measure? If the company can run the test across many cities, how would that change your experiment design?
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ETA importance and improvement
: Explain why estimated time of arrival, or ETA, is important in a ride-hailing product. What metrics would you use to measure ETA quality? What product, data, or machine-learning approaches would you consider to diagnose and improve ETA accuracy?
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Advance driver promotion for specific times and places
: The company wants to notify drivers one week in advance that they can earn a promotion if they go online and accept trips in specific locations during specific time windows. What effects could this incentive have? Why might a simple user-level A/B test be inappropriate? What problems would arise with a switchback experiment? If you instead used a synthetic control approach, how would you estimate uncertainty or variance?