I like how people in comments are keen to change the world, but I - more realisticly - only focus on gaming the system so I can actually save myself couple bucks right away.
I set pick up and destination, exit the app, open another rides app, wait few minutes for uber to notify me that the price went down.
I only give it initials (instead of full name) and phone number, not even my gender, I rarely rate drivers positively, if it is not a negative experience, I skip reviewing, so they don't know I "like" the service.
When it takes more than a minute to find a ride, I cancel the ride and choose the "others" option, as this is the de-facto the option for "I will just take a cab", so I get inserted on the "churn risk" list.
I use a virtual card that I some time leave empty so payment fail after the ride, and on the next ride I readjust my virtual card limit on the next ride and pay the last bill so I am added on the "poor and miserable riders" list.
Negligible saving for one ride, but I rely on Uber as I have no car and riding in taxis in my city is sometimes horrible, so it adds up on the long-run.
Probably false, like the urban legend that Uber charges more when a device's battery is low [0].
Claims like this go viral because they're practically unfalsifiable (It isn't in Uber's best interest to make their pricing algorithms public) and generate clicks. But when you take a closer look, it's always some anecdote that can be explained by people selecting different pricing tiers, or by multiple phones looking at the same route implying increased demand (the latter search might display a higher price). A proper experiment would involve dozens of phones under different scenarios making searches in a random order, then trying to correlate the variables with the prices. But for whatever reason, nobody ever does those experiments.
For what it's worth, I checked the price of an Uber with credits in my account against Lyft to the airport just now, and Uber was slightly cheaper.
Given the other ways they tried to intimidate journalists, anything like this which is conducted with the journalists’ own phones or near places they frequent is inadequate to say whether this actually happened — especially after it was going viral and all they’d have to do is flip the switch and lie about it until the attention dissipated.
It's not evidence that they did, but it's evidence supporting the claim they would. This isn't a court of law, I'm allowed to use "they've done <shady shit> before" to inform my prior for "they're doing <different shady shit> now".
They are proof that Uber has already done worse things that involve similar capabilities and rewards. In other words, it is the kind of organization that is much more likely to have done battery-panic pricing, and that should affect how credible you think the accusation is.
Compare the vibe of: "So what if he was convicted of home-invasion robbery, that doesn't prove he ever mugged anybody in an alley!"
True in the most literal sense, yet also missing the point.
You’re confusing unprovable and unfalsifiable. It could proven either through a whistleblower or finding an example where two accounts request the same ride at the same time and show a different price. If these sort of anecdotes aren't acceptable to you, you might say it's unprovable.
Unfalsifiable means it's impossible to submit evidence to contrary. In this case the proposition is that Uber sometimes charges you more based on having credits in your account. There is no way to prove this never happens through an experiment. If an experiment showed that two rides cost the same to users with and without credits, it doesn't show that it never happens.
In the article, the user looks at the price and thinks it seems higher than normal, which is different than comparing prices for identical rides at the same time.
EDIT: There is another account I missed in the article where identical rides are compared, so I take this back
The point of the OP is that it is impossible to submit evidence that contradicts these anecdotes, because it is impossible to prove something never happens through experiments.
Considering Uber’s stated, implicit and possibly legal goal is to maximize their profits, why do you believe they are choosing to not maximize profits in these situations?
There is a phrase "penny wise and pound foolish". That phrase is a good description of what's being alleged here. Trying to grab a few percent in ways that are likely to bring the hammer down when discovered is not exactly a great idea.
DoorDash still charges more for items compared to in person prices, charges a delivery fee, and then charges another fee which I can't remember what it was called. Then a tip. DoorDash can get bent. Which is exactly how I feel about Uber
> Trying to grab a few percent in ways that are likely to bring the hammer down when discovered is not exactly a great idea.
That assumes that there is a hammer that will be brought down and that the hammer actually has some weight behind it.
The reality is that it takes years for governments to react to people breaking or bending the law in novel, creative ways. The fact of illegality didn't stop Uber and a bunch of other competitors to provide taxi services, nor did it stop AirBnB from facilitating the running of illegal hotels world-wide.
Yes, eventually the hammer came down, but seriously, not even a million euros fine and of that, 50% suspended for Uber [1] or a few hundred K for AirBnB [2]... that's a joke, that's pennies for these ultra-large corporations. And so, yes, breaking the law and paying fines until it's actually hitting execs personally is the more profitable option in the mid run. Just change which law you break and you'll get off.
> He went a step farther and did something I didn’t: he checked Uber prices “with someone else’s phone” who did not have a balance in their Uber account – and Uber was pricing the route at the usual $20 for them.
Pricing needs to be transparent, but the reason for the pricing does not. As long as it’s labeled clearly and accurately you can decide to buy or not. You don’t get to tell Walmart they have to give a breakdown of everything that went into a pricing decision.
Free markets depend on a large number of competitors and low barriers to entry. Transparent pricing is unlikely to make much of a difference with Uber.
I mean, there are no surprise post-ride fees or anything. They're quoting you what the actual price is, and they're free to quote whatever they want for whatever reasons they want. Nobody's forcing you to agree to it. There's nothing stopping you from getting a competitive quote from Lyft by simply switching apps on the phone. Or by calling a cab company. Also there's nothing that keeps you from choosing to wait for a bus.
*Edit: Per Uber's help page there are exceptions to the up-front price quote actually being charged, but they are exceptions. My basic point that it's still a free market stands. "The upfront price you’re shown may change due to a number of circumstances, which may include adding stops, updating your destination, significant changes to the route or duration of the trip, or you pass through a toll that was not factored into your upfront price. In addition, you may incur wait time fees for the time you take to get to the car at the pickup or multi-stop fees for time spent at an on-trip stop."
> Due to unanticipated tolls or surcharges on this trip, we’ve adjusted your upfront fare to reflect the actually incurred charges. Please see the receipt breakdown for details.
What you're responding to is market demand for an alternative. Who knows if it'll spring into existence, but the words have been uttered into the universe.
Pricing algorithms have ALWAYS been private, for any business. They tell you the price straight up. You either like the price or you don't. They don't and should not need to explain where the number came from. Do you whine about the pricing algorithms behind McDonalds or the grocery store? I would hope not.
The issue is the computer age has allowed gray-area-illegal pricing discrimination to be partook at unprecedented scale. McDonald’s sets a price per market not user. It’s funny you mention them though, because just look at the shenanigans with the $10 whopper sticker prices to drive people to “download the McDonald’s app”. It’s just setting up a reverse auction in disguise.
Funnily enough, that is especially not the case with the market Uber competes with, a.k.a taxis. The fare is pre-advertised and is based on distance/time. Transparent pricing that does not vary by customer was a very important aspect of traditional taxi services, to the point where you could see your fare change in real time as the ride progressed.
This. B2C expectation is a fixed price, as if it was a property of the product or service, and any sudden changes need some plausible justification (like idk. import costs just went up because of a calamity, or sth.). When I go to the grocery store, I don't want to pay whatever I can individually negotiate with the seller - the hassle and resulting unpredictability has a large dollar cost on individuals' life too.
Specifically, transparent in that I can compare prices, which I can just check with my work phone or Lyft or Waymo, so they are. But when I buy a can of coke from the store, I have zero clue as to why it's priced. The algorithm used there is as opaque as Uber's is. I'd love for Uber to be transparent as to why a ride costs what it does, and how much goes to the driver, but there's no reason for them to do that.
The price adjustments due to coupons, rewards programs, and food stamps are all publicly available (transparent). No hidden algorthms. If the coupon says 10% off, then that's what you get. It's not maybe 10% off or maybe something else depending on a secret recipe like if the temperature is between x and y and you have a name that rhymes with Pobert or whatever else some AI has figured out.
The opacity is that people who don't have coupons generally don't know they exist. Coupons are a kind of price discrimination assuming that people with less time to coupon-hunt are willing to pay more.
The coupons I get in the mail from Fred Meyer (a local Kroger subsidiary) are custom, printed for me based on my purchase history. I can’t guarantee they alter the discount for the same item based on the customer, but it seems logical.
Also, the coupons they print on the fly with the receipt could be custom priced for that specific customer, as well.
Sometimes I receive a coupon in the mail but my sister who has the same last name as me and lives in the same town does not. Whatever algorithm causes that is pretty opaque.
Or their friend is the cashier and gives them the staff discount, or the cashier is crooked and over charges the person, or the person steals it.
Prices are different in different physical neighborhoods. Why shouldn't it be the same for digital neighborhoods and the user has an iPhone, or extra cash lying around? It offends your (and my) puritanical sensibilities, but prices are all made up and have no relation to what something costs to make (it's true. think about that deeply) anyway, so of evils in the world, Uber's pricing strategy is hardly the worst of it.
I _think_ they're trying to say that since we don't have transparent prices, and we have a free market, free markets must not depend on transparent prices. It's not obvious though because it seems that there's disagreement about whether or not we have free pricing (as seen by other subthreads here), so it wasn't clear to me at first if the parent comment here was arguing that we have transparent prices and therefore are communistic or that we don't and therefore aren't.
Right, thank you that. I didn't get what was being said there.
Of course in a large economy where most price discovery is transparent in the sense that they are not individualized and can't change in real-time based on arbitrary and hidden rulesets, then a few exceptions won't topple the whole thing. Some amount of fraud can also be tolerated. But too much and things start to break down.
Yep, I agree with that. I think there's probably a spectrum of "transparency" rather than just a binary thing, and we all have different ideas of where to draw the line of what's acceptable. They key question to me is whether it's transparent enough for there to be accountability. Right now, it's impossible to tell the difference between the pricing algorithm that Uber currently uses and one where they pull tricks like the one described in the article, and I think that's the problem; they might do it, they might not, and from the outside, it looks identical because there's no way to hold them accountable if they do.
> I checked the price of an Uber with credits in my account against Lyft to the airport just now, and Uber was slightly cheaper.
I appreciate that you checked and that you acknowledged the limitation of it as an anecdote, but it doesn't actually give us much information.
Companies are always doing experiments behind feature flags on subsets of the population. Some of those experiments would surprise the public. At any given time, the set of experiments that would surprise the public are only ever seen by a tiny slice of users.
People outside those companies will never hear of most experiments. And often only a few people inside the company will be aware of them.
Something like this is more like an existence proof (does it ever happen?) rather than a proof of universality (does it always happen to everyone, or even to most people?)
As usual, the real story is buried beneath garbage anecdotes like this. The multiple elephants in the room include
- positional pricing, certain geocodes command what is called pricing elasticity, aka. people going to the hospital dont care about the price. Time based pricing elasticity is also exploited, for example, people leaving the concert at 12am likely dont have other options
- driver bonuses and rider coupons optimizing for marginal rides. The riders and drivers at the margins of pricing are typically switchers, which mean that if you are loyal to any particular app, you will likely never get see these coupons or bonuses
This is probably the strongest response in this thread and I agree. It's implausible that Uber would directly implement something like "if customer has credits, charge them 10% more" or "if battery < 5%, increase price by 50%". But non-personalized pricing that's profitable yet exploitative of customers in a way that Uber can plausibly deny or allows for collusion without direct agreements? Completely realistic and even likely imo.
I'd love to see ProPublic or other investigative journalists do some research here. Especially on the driver side, because they seem to have even less leverage than average riders.
Not for battery, but Uber definitely charges riders different prices. I've done the experiments (accounting for order, rider rating, discounts, etc) and seen differences as big as +50%.
Uber support also confirmed it, after a lot of question dodging (emphasis mine):
---
Thank you for reaching out to us.
The prices of the trips and promotions are unique to users, that is correct. If you have in the future any trip that you feel like it's too expensive, please open a contact, attach the correct trip and we will gladly review it. There is sadly nothing you can do personally to change the fare rate of the trips before any discount is applied.
Probably. Still, a pricing algorithm may be based on all sorts of data points that get fed into an ML model. How sure are you that battery life or presence of credits don't make it in there, even accidentally?
If two accounts show different prices, it proves the pricing algorithm isn’t standard, but if they show the same price, it doesn’t prove that there are never situations where the pricing algorithm is predatory. It’s hard to prove a negative.
> if they show the same price, it doesn’t prove that there are never situations where the pricing algorithm is predatory. It’s hard to prove a negative.
That makes no sense, that's not what unfalsifiable means. By your logic even conservation of momentum is unfalsifiable, since you can't prove it holds in every situation. In fact I'm struggling to think of a single scientific theory that would be falsifiable by your definition.
Conservation of momentum is falsifiable because you could construct an experiment that where the expected movement based on the theory might not be observed, in which case the theory would be falsified.
Perhaps what you are getting at is that scientific theories can not be "known true" through experiments. This is correct. Theories can only be strengthened by experiments. It is not uncommon for theories long-believed true to be falsified later, despite extensive experimentation supporting them. Conservation of momentum, for example, doesn't apply when you zoom out far enough (i.e. general relativity).
The proposition that is unfalsifiable in this case is this: "Uber sometimes charges different rates based on if the user has credits." An experiment where the same rate is shown would not falsify this proposition, nor obviously would an experiment where a different rate is shown.
> Conservation of momentum is falsifiable because you could construct an experiment that where the expected movement based on the theory might not be observed, in which case the theory would be falsified.
No. That would only prove something about your specific time/location/instance of the experiment. It doesn't prove that the law holds in all time/space/instances of the experiment. That's literally impossible to prove, and that's what you're demanding here. You're claiming that just because you can't prove the pricing theory always holds then it's unfalsifiable. That's nonsensical and not how anybody uses the term.
Maybe if you do it enough, sounds like he did it once. Another possible explanation: Multiple people just checking for a ride in a certain area is a good indication that there's about to be high demand and Uber might use that as a signal to increase price.
I mean it's unfalsifiable because the marching forward of time makes asking a system to tell you a price is totally black boxed. But it would be nice to see a _bit_ more effort placed.
> A proper experiment would involve dozens of phones under different scenarios making searches in a random order, then trying to correlate the variables with the prices. But for whatever reason, nobody ever does those experiments.
Because of how much Uber spent doing counter-intelligence against every locality in the planet, I feel like even that might not be good enough. I could see them "knowing" what's going on!
I'm not a heavy user, but I noticed that if I start with Google Maps anonymously and hit the ride-share button which gives you a comparison of Uber, Lyft, etc. prices, that when you click through the price is consistently lower than if you start with an app. I'm not sure if it's circumstance, but it's worth giving a shot if you have the time.
If you can do this repeatedly, say 15 times, and record the numbers each time (say just put them in a spreadsheet), you can actually pretty easily run a "statistical test" to prove your theory at 95% confidence (which is what research journals often do).
You obviously don't need to justify your observations to anybody else, but if you did find a conclusive result it would make a good blog post.
[P.S. chat gpt could help with the statistical test part]
I always wonder what do the devs who coded these "features" think about themselves and/or what other people think about them.
Yes I know they are literally paid to not have these questions. But deep down, is there any remorse or guilt at all or is it just "not my problem" attitude all the way to the bank?
On a tangent, this is why I think there need to be more regulations with software development. Any real engineering discipline has tons of oversight and government agencies breathing down their neck to ensure compliance. Software came out when all these pushes for safety has been gutted and as a result we have a free for all race to the bottom.
There are many people who believe vigorously in dynamic pricing and it providing the "best service", and don't need to be paid to believe so.
The difficulty arises because the counter-argument of "surge pricing can kick in way faster than new cars show up on the road" is, in its details, subtle. And "this is just grabbing money for no increased service" goes against many people's idea that people should be able to charge arbitrary amounts for services if they feel like it. "People shouldn't be bidding against each other like this for transportation" is yet another can of worms.
This is a space where there are so many sticking points that many people will disagree with. A place where you can really understand gaps between people's axioms, depending on what part you focus on. And it's a place where Uber sits comfortably in the conclusion of the simple arguments, and the opposition to its tactics lies in the conclusion of very long, nuanced, contextful arguments (that still, at one point, require acknowledging that it's not good for society as a whole for a service provider to have unlimited pricing power, which is a big ask!).
How would you word a regulation against this sort of thing to apply against the low man on the totem pole, the lowly SWE? Might it be better if it was regulated as unfair and deceptive by a strong FTC with a nice bounty for SWEs?
One of the main avantage of regulating a professional board (eg. Engineers, doctors, etc) is to make an individual fully responsible. What if that "lowly swe" wasn't so lowly anymore and the company executives could go to jail if they pushed code without his stamp on it? In civil engineering, if your boss asks you to stamp something illegal and you do it, you can lose your title.
It garantees that there is always one person in charge who will take personal responsibility for the act and will fight for thing to be done properly and no one can bypass him.
We have fully licensed computer and software engineers in Canada. There isn't much demand for the professional designation outside of safety critical fields; many people graduate from accredited programs and never get the physical stamp.
You'd have to massively expand the bounds of what constitutes "engineering" when programming software.
This would immediately kill open source. Anyone who isn't an engineer couldn't write code unsupervised. Anyone who is, would refuse to release code publicly licence because you'd have professional liability for anyone that uses your code in perpetuity forever.
I like the idea because licensure helps deal with the power differential that some professionals have over the average person. But the lines would have to be drawn very carefully to avoid killing open source.
Instead of regulations, I think this is the kind thing that should be driving a push to unionize tech. For the most part we don’t need to worry about dangerous job sites or low pay, but we do have to worry about unethical business practices.
Specifically, if we had widespread “codetermination”, which gives board seats to union members, the people that build things would have a say in what they’re being asked to build.
> Specifically, if we had widespread “codetermination”, which gives board seats to union members, the people that build things would have a say in what they’re being asked to build.
We don't have legal or cultural barriers to leaving to work somewhere else if you don't like what your current employer chooses to spend their money on (and modern telecommuting counters issues from living in a one-employer town). Without those barriers needing to be compensated for, this sounds like just trying to seize control of other people's stuff.
Instead of something merely sketchy and probably not real, what about something clearly illegal and proven real like for example the VW emissions thing?
Or does being sketchy / probably immoral vs being actually illegal make a difference? Maybe something around twisting yourself in knots to justify something being corrosive in ways that knowingly doing wrong isn't?
I think all the people that have moral qualms have already refused to build such things. It doesn’t matter, because there’s a whole line of people in it only for the money that can take their place.
No one even had to code them necessarily. Imagine building a purchase prediction engine. You could easily accidentally slide credits in as a feature. In the same way that you have to be very careful in ML to not accidentally include either the answer or a close proxy for the answer in your training data and have the model learn that it should just pick the proxy for the answer.
Regardless, I'm also not clear what I think about government regulating the price of a service like Uber. My first thought is probably more harm than good. We mostly don't regulate the price of airline tickets. I don't see how Uber is any different.
Not a dev, but someone who went through a relatively shitty process implemented by a SaaS company at my first job.
The general idea was enshitification once new subscribers dried up. We auto renewed everyone that we could into a drastically different, and more expensive, pay structure then forced them to call if they wanted cancel.
I knew it was scummy at the time (circa 2012), and now wish I had at least SAID something. As a fresh college grad still, I needed the job and stability.
In an ideal world, we would empower workers to stand up for what is right, but every step of the system is designed to take that away from us. Having a moral choice is a luxury in today's workforce.
> As a fresh college grad still, I needed the job and stability.
This is why we have student debt. It keeps employees compliant and subservient.
No I don't think there is a cabal of industry conspiring to achieve this. But, with thousands of little nudges from business this is where we ended up.
I know sales leaders who intentionally encourage their sales people to get into financial commitments (e.g. buy that bigger house, a new sports car). This is all so that the seller is desperate and will work crazy hours to ensure they get their commissions and can pay these financial burdens.
I could also imagine that there is lot of gaslighting involved to feel good about themselves when making these features. For example, they will talk about in terms of prioritizing Ubers for customers because they need it more urgently hence the the premium. So, (1) you can comfortably talk about developing these features with each other (2) even though you know its BS you don't care because you know its gonna lead to good perf review (increased revenue by X%) => bonus.
Kind of how Apple justifies crazy App Store policies/pricing for keeping "customers safe".
I'm not a big fan of Uber, but this seems like a case of "confirmation bias." The author formed an opinion, then searched for anything that confirmed it and accepted that as proof, even if it was completely unrelated or just due to chance.
It's called "dynamic pricing" for a reason. Like stock market prices, it fluctuates rapidly based on hundreds of factors.
You don't need credits to see different prices—just compare with a friend's phone. Sometimes, their fare will be higher than yours, and other times, it will be lower.
Dynamic pricing is supposed to be based on the overall demand of the service at that instant. In this case, it is “price discrimination” based on the user, rather than the overall demand.
Uber was consistently charging me 20%-50% more than my friends. Same time, same origin, same destination, no discounts, regardless of who asked first or rider rating. Can't share screenshots without doxxing myself, though.
After being gaslit by Uber support for weeks, they finally admitted to charge riders different prices, and that there was nothing they could do to reset my price multiplier[1]. I suspect it was because I added a Work profile with corporate credit card for a trip years ago.
So I deleted my account, waited 30 days for the data to be expunged[2], and created a new account under a new email address and without my middle name. The prices are now normal!
This plus drivers constantly cancelling rides, makes me avoid Uber as much as I can.
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[1] Quoting Uber support: "The prices of the trips and promotions are unique to users, that is correct. [...] There is sadly nothing you can do personally to change the fare rate of the trips before any discount is applied."
[2] After requesting to delete your account, I received an email asking to explain the issue and if they could help me. Replying "no" automatically reactivated my account and reset the 30 day timer.
I noticed this exact behavior between my wife and I. I avoid Uber like the plague but unfortunately they have destroyed the alternatives. We need a right to anonymity for services. Knowing who I am isn't a requirement for the actual service but they want it so they can make additional money off of you. There should always be an option 'remain anonymous' that requires the vendor to immediately delete any information on you and use nothing identifiable about you in their service. If they are found to break that then there should be severe penalties that are paid directly to the person impacted and all lawyer fees go to the company with no option for 'arbitration'.
> Knowing who I am isn't a requirement for the actual service
Building a history that you won't assault the driver or puke in their car is actually material to them offering you rides. You might not be someone who would try and rob the Uber driver, but lets admit that such people exist, and that it's in Uber's best interest not to let people like that use their platform.
This was not a requirement before Uber but it is now somehow an argument after. Reporting a crime or vandalism during a ride is grounds for being banned from the service, but the actual service, if you aren't banned, doesn't require knowing who you are, or were. If this is actually a valuable thing then you should get paid for allowing, with informed consent (opt-in, not opt-out and not dark patterns), that information to be used.
> You might not be someone who would try and rob the Uber driver, but lets admit that such people exist, and that it's in Uber's best interest not to let people like that use their platform.
Not to excuse taxi robbers or taxi drivers raping female passengers, but... somehow humanity seems to have existed with that for decades just fine? What is different between now and back then, maybe other than that we're finally taking women seriously?
Know Your Customer is a cancer that is spreading from the financial industry to every other industry in the name of advertisements, subscriptions, and selling "insights" to other parties. And like so many other new regulations and like you mentioned below, it only ever seems to help the billion-dollar company and not its customers.
People are assuming that some evil mustache-twirling PM/engineer decided to charge users more if they have credits in their account. The truth may be far more banal. They may be using a ML model to determine pricing. The ML model takes as input all known information about that user. One of those inputs, which simply came bundled together with everything else, is the user's credit balance. The ML model, after much historical analysis, figured out that it can charge users more if they have credits available. The relevant engineers treated the ML model as a black box, ran an A/B test, saw a 1.3% increase in revenue, and decided to roll it out.
If this isn't already happening, I expect this will be the future of our industry.
You might be right, but I'm failing to see how this is less evil mustache-twirling. A PM/engineer decided "I bet we can create an ML model that will find suckers we can charge more," is basically the same as "I bet people with credits will pay more." In either case, they're making a decision to find people they can screw over. In the latter case, it's based on intuition. In the former, it's based on statistics. However, the motivation remains the same.
If people are thinking this is evil, it's the motivation and the result that matter, not the means through which they achieve their goal.
And if they used ML as a black box, it could act in problematic ways. Maybe the ML figured out that it could charge Black riders more. They didn't look into it and just rolled it out. Things like that can happen when you don't look into stuff.
And I'd say that it's questionably legal. If a store charged you more money because you were using a gift card, I think we'd all agree that the store had unjustly taken value from you. Here, Uber is allegedly charging people with credits a higher amount - essentially stealing gift card value.
I'm not sure "oh, it was just our ML deciding to steal your money," is a great defense. Ok, but what was the ML supposed to do. Well, it was supposed to figure out who we could take more money from for the same product.
At some point, the not giving a shit because it maximizes profit is all you need to be a bit judgy.
If they were doing something relatively frictionless that obviously increased efficiency? People wouldn't care.
Mindlessly doing what the model says, even though it's awful for the customer, to marginally increase profit some of the time by charging some customers more? People get pissed off...
That isn't that different than choosing to charge more for accounts with credits. Make "having credits" available to an ML model and then let the ML model "ethics wash" the decision.
Uber is the most dishonest app (and company) I know, by an order of magnitude.
The app lies about everything. What the wait time is likely to be, how many drivers there are, whether your driver is moving or not, how long it will take to find another driver when the first driver cancels, etc.
Wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be true. Completely consistent with the rest of my experience with this company.
The entire purpose of modern technology has become to programmatically extract as much profit from every transaction every individual undertakes every day comfortable in the knowledge there’s not enough hours in the day for said consumers to scrutinize them all.
Based on my single user anecdotal data, I noticed that when I have additional Uber credit in my Uber account, I get less often or less amount of Uber Eats promotion.
During their growth years when they arguably did the shadiest stuff they also had record-breaking quarterly losses in the billions while their counterpart DiDi in China was doing well enough to acquire Uber China (who according to Travis Kalanick was losing over $1b a year).
truth is Uber had no chance in China to succeed in long term regardless and Travis was naive to think CCP would let a foreign company win logistics market so rich with data.
An alternatively hypothesis is that users with credits in their account are committed spenders, and so are less likely to receive discounts. In the same way, frequent users are more committed.
I rarely use Uber/Eats, so when I do I almost always have ~1/3rd off through some voucher or something. They also do vouchers that work over multiple purchases in order to build habits.
If they do charge more, it will only hurt them with people checking and using a competitor for a lower price. It will not hurt the employed economist's paycheck though who will continue to peddle pricing patterns that don't actually work in the real world, still collecting a generous salary for deceiving the company and shareholders.
n=1, but also common knowledge in deals forums, that if you have credits in your account, you don't get deals. Uber eats is only usable at the 25-40% off deals they do since the markup is often that much. If you have credits or Uber one, you don't get the deals.
I never even hear of uber credits. I always charge it to my card. In europe we often use Bolt too, which is a competing service. So I actually have used Bolt more than Uber.
These combination/cross deals are AFAIK quite rare in the EU (or outside the US in general?) If your credit card is branded some way, it'll give you something with that brand (e.g. Lufthansa CC) but that's about it. (And I don't think there's an Uber branded credit card?)
Is there an (academic / journalistic) area/body of research about the pricing/recommendation/other influential algorithms of various products?
I have conspiracy theories about Spotify autoplay (wouldn't it seem smart to prioritize songs with lower licensing cost?) and would like to see them checked. Surely I can't be the only person interested in the specific ways products used by hundreds of millions of people actually work?
There's a lot of superstition and anecdotal evidence in this area and it would be great to see a reliable source of actual research.
Honesty and transparency can be a brand asset to create long-term loyalty, which reduces customer churn, reduce marketing spend, etc. All it takes is founders/executive leaders who can see past top- and bottom-line.
It's time to start legislating against dynamic pricing.
I don't know if this particular claim is true but dynamic pricing is getting out of control. Things should have an advertised price rather than some amorphous ML system deciding to charge you more because you're desperate or you can afford it (according to some criteria).
These companies have to be careful too because they may open themselves up to discrimination claims. There are protected classes you can't discriminate against under federal law. Facebook already settled a case of race discrimination in housing ads [1]. This has nothing to do with dynamic pricing but I guarantee you dynamic pricing will open up more of these issues.
I don't think it's necessarily the case that dynamic pricing shouldn't exist at all (eg, cooperative load shedding on the electrical grid).
However I should, as someone who just left a concert, have a notion as to how much it's in my best interests to either rideshare with my friend and deal with two stops, or walk up the street to a restaurant and kill an hour or two while we wait for the chaos to dissipate. If the price difference is going to pay for a drink or an appetizer, then maybe I voluntarily timeshift.
And we don't seem to be near that bar at the moment.
IMO, totally banning dynamic pricing is too far. Wouldn't it solve this problem just as effectively if dynamic pricing were still allowed, but the algorithm had to be fully open?
there's nothing wrong with dynamic pricing, but there is a lot wrong with price discrimination, bait and switch, hidden fees, and outright fraud. (and we know that uber has historically engaged in many highly dishonest practices)
here's my favorite rideshare gouge, I'm sure others have had the same experience.
"currenly 20 minute wait, upgrade to uber+$ for 3 minute availability?"
YES!
"OK booked, your ride at the higher rate is on the way, currently 20 minutes away!"
now, it is possible that "offer" message was shown to a bunch of people at the same time and somebody snagged it in front of me leaving only the other car 20 mins away, i.e. the computer was "honest", but I shouldn't be paying the higher rate. clever programmer types can come up with other scenarios, the point is, we need guarantees that the market making is honest, or we need regulation.
When is this shitty company going to be finally shut down. Its been caught so many times cheating or breaking state laws. Just shut it down already. The business model doesn't work, its cooked.
I hate to run PR for Uber, but the battery story is just urban legend. If you dig into the headlines, they all trace back to one article written by a small Belgian newspaper [1] which is barely more than a blurb. The evidence in the article is one very casual experiment:
> Dernière Heure conducted a test using two smartphones, one with 84% battery and the other with 12%, to request a ride from their office in Brussels to Tour & Taxis in the centre.
> The result showed a significant price difference, with the phone at 12% battery being charged €17.56 and the phone at 84% battery being charged €16.6 for the same service.
Uber also denies it in the article. Obviously you don't have to believe them but IMO it's more likely that the "significant price difference" (less than one euro) is explained by some other variable that the author wasn't able to identify.
This is all nonsense. Uber does not do any sort of up charging based on anything remotely uniquely identifiable. All of the dynamic pricing is based on publicly stated known information Uber has stated, ie surge based pricing. This and other anecdotal stories, such as battery life are all click bait.
I set pick up and destination, exit the app, open another rides app, wait few minutes for uber to notify me that the price went down.
I only give it initials (instead of full name) and phone number, not even my gender, I rarely rate drivers positively, if it is not a negative experience, I skip reviewing, so they don't know I "like" the service.
When it takes more than a minute to find a ride, I cancel the ride and choose the "others" option, as this is the de-facto the option for "I will just take a cab", so I get inserted on the "churn risk" list.
I use a virtual card that I some time leave empty so payment fail after the ride, and on the next ride I readjust my virtual card limit on the next ride and pay the last bill so I am added on the "poor and miserable riders" list.
I am well protected
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