Scenario

You are the product/analytics lead for a food-delivery marketplace. You must evaluate several Dasher-facing initiatives before deciding whether to launch them:

• Top-Dasher prioritization: preferentially prioritize “top” couriers in dispatch.
• Extra-Pay incentives: targeted pay boosts to increase engagement in specific zones/times.
• Switching pay model: from per-order to per-time compensation.

Assumptions (for clarity):

• “Top-Dasher” = a courier who meets defined reliability/quality thresholds (e.g., high completion rate, on-time rate, low cancel rate) and would receive higher dispatch priority in treatment areas.
• “Marketplace health” blends outcomes across consumer, merchant, and courier experiences alongside unit economics.

Questions

1. How would you assess whether the Top-Dasher program should be launched?
2. For an extra-pay incentive aimed at improving Dasher engagement: a) What primary success metric(s) would you track? b) Design an A/B test (treatment/control, randomization unit, experiment length, sample size, and guardrail metrics).
3. The company is considering switching Dasher compensation from per-order to per-time. What are the key pros and cons of each model, and how would you experimentally validate which model is better for marketplace health?

Hints

Discuss causal identification (experiments vs. quasi-experiments), KPI definition (accept rate, fulfillment time, retention), supply–demand balance, cost impact, and potential negative externalities (gaming, spillovers, fairness).