Time-Based Dasher Pay Pilot and Marketplace Root-Cause Analysis

Context

DoorDash is a three-sided marketplace (consumers, dashers, merchants). Leadership is considering shifting dasher compensation from per-order to time-based (hourly) pay. They also want a rigorous framework to diagnose sudden drops in critical marketplace metrics.

Task

1. Should DoorDash pilot paying dashers by time instead of by order? Propose an experiment design that covers:

• Treatment definition, randomization unit, sampling/geo selection, spillover control
• Primary success metrics, cost metrics, and guardrail metrics across consumers, dashers, and merchants
• Segmentation and heterogeneity analysis
• Ramp, power/MDE, and risk mitigation
• How to control for broader marketplace effects (supply-demand equilibrium, pricing/dispatch interactions, seasonality, external shocks)

2. Suppose a critical marketplace metric (e.g., order completion rate) suddenly declines. Describe a structured, step-by-step process to:

• Localize and identify root cause(s) across consumers, dashers, merchants, platform/instrumentation, and external factors
• Quantify business impact and prioritize mitigations

Hints: Include A/B test setup, guardrail metrics, segment analysis, hypotheses tree, and considerations for external factors and data instrumentation.