take-rate-controller

A fast, deterministic controller that sets a per-transaction commission (take rate) to hit an aggregate target, while protecting the counterparty on the unattractive transactions.

Marketplaces usually want an overall take rate, say 20%, without charging the same percentage on every transaction. A flat rate is simple but crude: it over-taxes low-value or hard-to-serve jobs and leaves value on the table on attractive ones. take-rate-controller decides each transaction's commission inside configured bounds so that the running effective take rate converges on the target, lowering or zeroing commission on low-value or low-demand transactions to protect earnings, and taking a little more on high-demand ones.

It is a control and optimization problem, so it is built as a control loop, not a large model: each decision is arithmetic plus a bounded, explainable modulation, returned in microseconds, fully auditable, and safe for money.

Scope note: a generic marketplace take-rate engine (rides, delivery, services). Deterministic at inference, with no LLM anywhere in the money path. This is the reusable engine, not a clone of any one platform's product.

How it works

flowchart LR
    Req[amount, tax, segment] --> V[validate]
    V --> C[controller\ntarget vs current effective]
    C --> M[signal modulation\ndemand / supply / opportunity]
    M --> K[clamp to segment bounds]
    K --> D[decision: commission %, amount, payout]
    Done[completed txns] -. async .-> Agg[running aggregates] --> C
    D --> L[decision log]
    C -. timeout / failure .-> FB[safe fallback] --> D

• Per-segment config: a zero-commission threshold, a minimum, a maximum, and a target, held in memory and hot-reloadable.
• Closed-loop control: proportional and integral correction on the gap between the running effective take rate and the target, so the aggregate lands where it should over time.
• Signal modulation: each decision is nudged by demand, supply, and opportunity scores, down to protect low-value or low-demand transactions, up on high-demand ones.
• Money-safe by construction: minor units or decimals, never floats; commission taken on the amount after tax; the invariant commission + payout == amount_after_tax is checked; the result is hard-clamped so a payout can never go negative or out of bounds.