When Disclosure Is Compulsory: Evaluating Ride-Hailing Rebalancing Policies with Self-Interested LLM Driver Agents

Xinyu Wang, Andres Fielbaum

The EU Platform Work Directive, to be transposed by December 2026, requires ride-hailing platforms to state in plain language the main parameters of their automated decisions and how a worker's behaviour affects them. Such rules are exactly what a large language model (LLM) can read, so drivers will be able to let one decide for them. We compare two main families of rebalancing policy once their rules are public: a reactive policy (R) that sends idle drivers to cover requests just lost, and an anticipatory policy (A) that plans moves on a demand forecast. Each driver is an LLM agent maximizing its own net income, given no rules (N) or the rules at the directive's level of detail (L). We test two LLMs, Claude Haiku 5.5 and Jev, which understand the rules equally well, in a three-zone model and in Manhattan. With the rules disclosed, drivers follow the platform more closely: in Manhattan, the share of relocation offers they decline falls from about four in five to one in four under both policies. Yet the effects differ by policy. For the platform, disclosure costs R 3.7% of its profit in Manhattan, as R now pays for moves drivers used to make for free, while A's profit is…