
How I investigated Uber surge pricing in D.C - danso
https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/how-i-investigated-uber-surge-pricing-dc/
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SocksCanClose
Not to state the obvious, but surge pricing is simply the most efficient way
to motivate people on the platform (read: drivers) to flow into an underserved
area (read: where the customers are). The macro take-away on this is that we
should celebrate the fact that Uber is trying to incentivize its driving
population to serve its riding population by implementing surge pricing. The
opposite would be Lyft, which I doubt has any reasonable way other than asking
nicely to try to encourage its drivers to venture into these underserved
areas...

And yes, I understand that this opinion (read: "interpretation of the laws of
supply and demand as they affect reality as it exists") is likely to be
unpopular, and am prepared to be labeled all sorts of nasty things and
downvoted.

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greenleafjacob
Why did the author choose Washington, D.C. rather than NYC for which there is
a public data set of 1 billion yellow cab trips and partial data on 19 million
Uber trips? [1]

[1] [http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc-
ta...](http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc-taxi-and-
uber-trips-with-a-vengeance/)

~~~
danso
I think it's because the author is based out of Maryland...and the historical
Uber trip data doesn't provide much insight on surge pricing, at least in the
way the API can in real time and by specific vehicle.

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waitwhatwhoa
cool! another approach to that task:
[http://conferences2.sigcomm.org/imc/2015/papers/p495.pdf](http://conferences2.sigcomm.org/imc/2015/papers/p495.pdf)

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AnthonyMouse
> This was a practical decision made to reduce our story space, as there were
> some Uber products that had very different surge pricing patterns, and
> including these would convolute the narrative we were telling.

There was data that contradicted your narrative so you excluded it? That Is
Not Science.

~~~
tobtoh
'convolute' != 'contradict'

Convolute means (in this context) to making something more complex to explain
or difficult to follow. It does not mean that they excluded data that
contradicted their analysis.

In this case, they focussed only on UberX since the surge pricing mechanism is
different for the other Uber products - there is nothing wrong with that.

~~~
dsp1234
It seems like important information is missing with regards to their
conclusion.

Their conclusion is "But how effective can they be if they fail to reach 15%
of a population?".

However, if they are excluding all other Uber services other than UberX from
their analysis, then that's problematic since those other services could be
covering that 15% of the population.

Do the totality of Uber services provide coverage in the areas that this
analysis highlights? I don't know, and given the analysis as written, I don't
know how anyone else can either (without doing another analysis). So it seems
at least worth considering whether convoluted vs contradicted is the case
since we're missing a key piece of information.

~~~
tssva
"But how effective can they be if they fail to reach 15% of a population" was
in reference to the fact that almost 15% of the DC population doesn't have a
bank account which the author took to mean they can't use UberX or any other
Uber service. This isn't strictly true but the barrier to entry without a bank
account is high enough to dissuade most of this population from using Uber
services.

