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.
> 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.
This type of attitude sometimes makes the world a worse place. If everyone has this attitude, the system can break down.
> I rarely rate drivers positively
Drivers live or die by their rating. Refusing to give good reviews harms the drivers who are already barely scraping by. This is a very good example of how you can cause real world harm with by trying to game the system for yourself.
> Drivers live or die by their rating. Refusing to give good reviews harms the drivers who are already barely scraping by.
I drive on Uber part-time. In my city at least, rating is not such a big deal. The vast vast majority of people give 5 stars ratings (i'm talking about 99% of ratings).
I assume there are some people who only give ratings when the service was exceptionally good or exceptionally bad, or would otherwise consider 3 stars as a fair rating for a normal experience. Let's call there honest raters. As a driver, i don't think honest raters can have such a big impact on me, because the platform is designed so that there's no preference to always match honest raters to some particular drivers. Their honest ratings will be spread more or less uniformly among drivers.
And, if we want to apply Kantian logic and think "but what would happen if everybody did the same?", well, Uber is a live system too: if more people would become honest raters, then the ceiling of what's the minimum average rating you need to have as a driver would be lowered accordingly. Uber needs drivers too. It needs to keep a healthy balance of available drivers and available passengers. If either of the two gets too low, if would lose the other part in short time.
> I drive on Uber part-time. In my city at least, rating is not such a big deal. The vast vast majority of people give 5 stars ratings (i'm talking about 99% of ratings).
Same here, and all that means the scale is different. 4.70 is I drive on Uber part-time. In my city at least, rating is not such a big deal. The vast vast majority of people give 5 stars ratings (i'm talking about 99% of ratings), 4.80 is bad, 4.90 is good, 4.95+ is very friendly. I no longer am assigned any drivers below 4.85 because I
started consistently cancelling every driver I got below 4.8.
I recently got some help from my banker dealing with sorting out accounts following a death. When we finished she told me she'd appreciate a review on the survey I'd likely get, but that only 4s and 5s (or 9s-10s) count. In the end I didn't get a survey but it left a bit of a weird taste, I've worked with her for 8-10 years, she seems good at her job, and I've never really had any complaints.
Some systems are worth breaking down. On a macro-level, I think it's safe to assume that drivers are already being maximally exploited by the algorithm.
> If everyone has this attitude, the system can break down.
Yes, that is why "I like how people [in comments] are keen to change the world", I don't want everyone to be as lazy as I am.
> Refusing to give good reviews harms the drivers who are already barely scraping by. This is a very good example of how you can cause real world harm with by trying to game the system for yourself.
No uber rider owe feedback at all, even if there is no gain of skipping it..
I would understand your argument if I were giving negative feedback on purpose for good drivers, which I consider a false testimony and a lie, but every user have all the right to skip reviewing, owing no more than the ride fees.
No one actually knows what the global maximum is, or how to get there, outside of any specifics that religion may or may not tell you.
A "global maximum" closely parallels the definition of faith. It's the maximal good for the maximal number of people, and a real destination for some (surely not all are worthy of it, as long as human evil exists). How we get there, what it is, who actually makes it there, on what basis, what's preventing its realization at present, how to overcome such obstacles --- these are the questions that religions (including secular humanism) answer.
That may be the case but this can be seen as 'Hate the game not the player'. Just because folks are in this position doesn't mean you should be complicit in its continuation as it stands.
I mean I get it, you end up hurting those that have the least power. It is a rough predicament to be in.
> This type of attitude sometimes makes the world a worse place. If everyone has this attitude, the system can break down.
Any system like this entails a set of individual incentives. If following those incentives would lead the system to break down, the system is already broken.
"Drivers live or die by their rating" - really??? I have never given the drivers rating a moments thought. Do you seriously cancel rides because the driver doesn't have 5 stars??
If a driver's average rating falls below 4.6 Uber typically removes them from the platform. A rating of less than 5 stars is treated similarly to if a customer reported a driver for poor service.
I guarantee their algorithms factor in average number of riders who don’t rate anyone lol. Maybe they weight them. Maybe they grade everyone on a bell curve. Maybe they use it in C-suite meetings to determine strategies. I can just about guarantee they don’t ignore it, though.
They’re a tech company;a decent rating algorithm should be one of the most likely things for them to excel in, or they’d just lose to any company that does because all the good drivers they’re dropping are immediately signing up to work for a competing service.
tl;dr It is in ride-services’ best to retain good drivers, no?
A non rating doesn't directly affect their score. But if a driver doesn't get plenty of five star reviews, they'll get dropped from the app because there are always people who give bad reviews because they had a bad day.
I'm not sure if any of this actually saves you money. If anything, it may drive the algorithm to pair you with less than stellar drivers. In a customer retention phase, which Uber is in right now, the algorithm should aim to pair good clients with good drivers and poor clients with poor drivers, just to protect the repeat business.
I'm convinced the person you're replying to is right. At my last job, all of us took separate Ubers every day. I started cancelling every driver below X rating. After a while, Ive ended up only being assigned drivers far above X, while my colleagues still got low rated drivers often enough (they never cancelled based on rating). My own rating wasn't higher than theirs, and I was a worse customer in that I used Uber less than they did.
all steps, like .. fiddling with virtual cards, retrying transactions, occasionally cancelling when searching for a driver ... this seems like waay too much effort.
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.
Do you have info, anecdotal or otherwise, on how much you think you save per ride in total and relative amounts? That might sound like a lot, but really I'm just wondering if you can estimate "I think I save about $X dollars on a fare that would cost $Y dollars otherwise."
By leaving the app before booking, I often get 10%-20% off (it claims rates went low, of course it's just a retention discount), not sure about others.
Yeah, and any individual vote doesn't make a difference, so why take the time to vote?
I don't know man... saving a few bucks on the average HN 300k+ salary doesn't make a difference, but let people have their principles. Isn't that the source of the original hacker mentality and the stuff we like to celebrate here?
Wouldn’t / shouldn’t this heavily penalize you? Like, what I want to optimize for is that when there’s little Uber capacity and many requests, that I get prioritized and get put as close to the front of the queue as possible. Which is why I tend to stick to just one app (Uber), and try to have a high rating.
But idk if it’s doing anything. At least back when Uber had tiers (platinum / diamond) it was more obvious the perks you get with more use (like with airlines), but now that they dropped those I’m feeling less inclined to keep using just Uber vs a mix of all apps and picking cheapest.
The system cannot penalize the working party in the same way it penalizes the paying party, if you are an easy customer whi never complain, always seem satisfied, would ride anyway no matter how high is the current rate, we might as well assign you any driver.
If you are a difficult customer who is rarely satisfied and complain of most inconveniences, you will get the better drivers.
Because simply, the algorthm is prioritizing sales, not nice and chill riders.
> 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 don't live in the US, and over here a driver rating below 4.8 guarantees you a rollercoaster ride by an angry man. I've cancelled enough times straight after being assigned such a driver that I now only get drivers with near-perfect ratings. Doesn't take any longer either.
It's sad that it's come to this, but you've really got to make the algorithm work for you.
I'm not in the US, and over here, any driver with a rating unf
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.
> I see. That seems like pretty good evidence then.
Two data points, one gathered immediately after another for the same route from a separate device, from a provider known to track demande and use "surge pricing"?
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.
> You don’t get to tell Walmart they have to give a breakdown of everything that went into a pricing decision.
If Walmart would have a custom price for everyone that walks in based on how much Walmart thinks they can afford, then yes: absolutely there should be more transparency.
Those situations aren’t the same: Walmart charges everyone the same price and they advertise those prices so they’re stable over some time. Uber has multiple sources of dynamic behavior and so I think it’s reasonable to demand visibility, similar to how an airplane fare breaks down the portions which are demand based from the things which are static.
This... isn't true. The same item at a Walmart near San Francisco will have a different price than in nowhere, Kansas.
But the person I was responding to was saying that the reasons for a price need to be transparent, which I think is orthogonal to whether a company has universal same-price-for-everyone guarantees.
And most companies do not charge the same thing to everyone, even within a market. Think about AAA and senior discounts, loyalty programs, etc.
It’s true in a market for Walmart but not Uber, and the same is true for everything else you mentioned – senior discounts don’t vary per-person. I think that’s a fundamental difference since private per-customer pricing opens up the possibility for the kind of abuses which Uber has been accused of repeatedly.
I worked in the pricing team at the time. There was essentially no personalization. The biggest factors were your current location, where you're going, the time of the day, current demand level around you, and current supply of drivers around you. Promotions were slightly more personalized but battery level was not used.
I suppose it's also possible that they are taking hundreds of data points including battery life and credits, and training some ML. Then they don't even really know what the algorithm is, other than whatever the weights they are feeding it.
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.
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.
When I go to the supermarket, I get one price for bananas and my friend gets that same price. I don't pay 1 dollar while he pays 1.10. All the customers have the same pricing. This is the key difference.
If every customer has a different price, like Uber does, that opens up pandora's box. Naturally customers will start wondering about patterns and what they can do to lower their price. They might speculate if people of race X are given a slightly higher price on average, or what other physical characteristics might play a role.
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.
Well, generally, they tell everyone the price. In this case, they're only telling you the price, and that price might change tomorrow, or in 5 minutes, or if you move 5 blocks to the south, or if the local commuter train gets delayed, or... By how much, for each input? Who knows. Hence, the concern about the lack of transparency.
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.
Yes, except the driver will never have his child in a car seat in the front apologetically. And the passenger will pay in excess, but to the stock market and not the driver.
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!! Yet "free markets" seemed to work out anyway.
Go to an auction house, or a swap meet. Haggle for prices, against other buyers, negotiate with sellers. Approach any salesman in a business with unpublished prices (B2B especially.) Try to purchase a home or a vehicle, middleman or not.
Think about it, and you'll discover that pricing algorithms have been subject to human whim since before the invention of money.
The amazing innovation of markets was indeed, up-front price tags, fairness to all buyers, yet any underlying algorithm was still private and proprietary, so the consumer at a Safeway doesn't really have any idea what his carton of milk costs or why he's paying $7 for it.
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.
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.
Hold them accountable for what exactly?! Uber provides a service - how much it costs depends on many factors like where you live, time of the day and many other factors. You open the app to see what their services cost and you can then choose to use their services or not.
There is no price transparency in many businesses. Try buying airline tickets online - first try at your own home. Then take your laptop and go to a zipcode where one of your friends lives that is much better off than you financially and try the same thing. Next, do the same but go to a different friend's house, one that perhaps lives in a zipcode that is a lot less affluent and see what happens there. Then repeat this same test but use MacBook Pro vs some shitty HP running Windows 7 and see what the difference is. Next, get NordVPN and get your self parked elsewhere and see what happens with the pricing... It is quite silly to even discuss "price transparency" in 2024 mates :)
> There is no price transparency in many businesses. Try buying airline tickets online
People hate airline pricing as well, so I'm not sure that makes the point you think it does. I don't see why "lots of business do something people don't like" somehow means people should stop disliking it.
> It is quite silly to even discuss "price transparency" in 2024 mates :)
If you think it's silly to spend time discussing it, you're not under any obligation to. There's nothing wrong with people who do think it's an issue discussing it either though, and I don't think anyone concerned by it is going to be particularly dissuaded by just asserting that they shouldn't be.
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.
After I gave my 5,000th ride on Uber I had a beer. I thought. I pondered. I devised the iniquity experiment.
(1) N drivers authorized on the Rideshare platform are engaged.
(2) these N drivers drive simultaneously and in a similar geographic preference- as if they live in the same neighborhood, but also are optimizing as drivers do. And yet drawn home.
(3) pricing, earnings, etc. are recorded per driver and compared across drivers on the Rideshare platform(s).
Now we engage the experimental component. With N drivers we can have N/2 drivers engage in behavior A or behavior B. Then, when the Rideshare platform denies they do this or that depending on that or this, there is good evidence that is not the case. Statistical evidence. Tallyho, bandits!
I believe data from all New York City trips from companies like Lyft and Uber since 2019 [1] can be downloaded from Taxi & Limousine Commission [2]. This data appears to include information such as the fare, date and time and TLC taxi zones for the pickup and dropoff [3].
I wonder if there is enough granularity in this data to make a determination if there's a large discrepancy/variation in fare in certain taxi zones at the same time with Uber, compared with Lyft or other competitors.
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.
> 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?)
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.
From Karl Popper: "The only way to verify a claim such as "All swans are white" would be if one could theoretically observe all swans, which is not possible. On the other hand, the falsifiability requirement for an anomalous instance, such as the observation of a single black swan, is theoretically reasonable and sufficient to logically falsify the claim."
I'm not saying what you think I am saying. The theory that "Uber price is always independent of whether the rider has credits" is indeed falsifiable, and the experiment in the anecdote seems to do so.
The opposite claim, "that Ubers do not always charge the same rate" -- the one that logically flows from falsifying the first -- is the claim that is unfalsifiable.
Is it a valid criticism of the claim? I would generally agree with you and say not really.
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?
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!
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.
The author's test proves the theory; it doesn't falsify the theory. The test could only prove the theory or fail to prove it. Failing to prove is not the same as falsifying.
If we're discussing falsifiability and logical reasoning, perhaps let's get more specific with terms. The author has a hypothesis, rather than a theory. "Theory" would be a lot more rigorous than just conjecturing this one thing.
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 do find chatgpt is helpful in laying out the formulas you should you in the context that they should be used in. Something I personally know I have no business doing.
... At the same time, I also am aware of how hilariously dumb chat GPT can be in deep technical contexts. I've taken to saying that when it comes to a technical topic, chatGPT will confidently tell you the wrong thing to do 50% of the time, but that's fine because it will give you the terms and context you can use to audit its solution yourself. Even if you don't understand the answers you can easily have chat gpt explain the gaps, again, 50%, but giving real information contextualizes the conversation better. I would expect this to improve accuracy, and my personal experience bares this out.
There was a brief window of time where the strongest chess players were chimeras, humans who assessed AI suggestions. Quickly even they found themselves outperformed by engines.
I suspect this is happening here as well. And I also suspect its going to take a good deal longer.
The rideshare tab in Maps gives me time/distance/traffic estimates and no prices. Whether I'm logged in, or Incognito. No prices unless I tap "Open App ->"
There is no rideshare tab in the desktop version, only tried it on my Android.
I'm looking at it now, but it no longer shows Uber as an option for me, only Lyft, and it doesn't show prices. I guess that was short-lived. Last time I used it was a month or so ago.
Interestingly, Uber and Waymo have partnered in some markets, for example Austin/Atlanta, where riders must use the Uber app to summon an autonomous Waymo:
In my market, Maps is showing me options for Lyft or Waymo autos only. However, Lyft is co-branded with scooters and e-bikes, so if I opened that app instead, I'd be presented with even more options.
So, our Maps experience may depend on the market and other variables, which brings us back to TFA's topic, I suppose.
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!).
Surge pricing is literally just supply and demand. It tries to ensure the number of people who need a taxi is the same as the number of people who drive. A glut in drivers decreases driver earnings while a glut in riders will cause long wait times.
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 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?
The devs might just adapt to the users who take an Uber to the next union meeting. People know about the consequences of this kind of "freelancing" but still don't care enough to adapt their consumption.
It is not a single dollar worth it to them and people don't seem to see the connection between their own working conditions and their demands for consumption.
Sure, Uber also destroyed or at least challenged a lot of taxi monopolies. For that alone it was surely worth it. But I think "abusing" the price flexibility of customers is anything nefarious as they certainly do the same.
- do they believe they're doing a job that is otherwise net positive to society or their users ?
- how hard would it be to successfully argue against this feature getting implemented ?
For instance I'd they think Uber is saving humanity but this feature would cost their whole career if they went hard against it, the remorse would be negligible.
For others it could be the last straw breaking the camel's back.
In general I think we're turning the blind eye to many shitty practices if we assume it's a small issue in the grand scheme of things. I mean, we wouldn't have so many dark patterns and spam emails from almost every companies we interact with if it wasn't the case.
When was the last time you went to tell your marketing department to dial it down ?
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.
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.
You need share holders' approval to join the board. Today's markets immediately punish a company which supports union.
So forcing your way is the only practical way to get a union board seat
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
Lots of things work this way though.
1) Airlines charge more to fly direct from A -> B while charging less for someone to fly from A -> B -> C. Some people try skiplagging to game the system but you run the risk of getting banned by the airline if you do that.
2) Another hilarious experience I have had is when I was paying things for my wedding. Some vendors (florists, cake makers, etc) will charge outrageous rates if you tell them it's for a wedding. But they will charge very reasonable rates if you claim it is just for a non-wedding family event (for the same amount of flowers, same size/layers of cake, etc).
3) A similar thing I have been warned about is electricians charging more if you claim you want an EVSE installed for your new Tesla as opposed to having just a regular NEMA 14-50 outlet installed in your garage. For the former, they will quote much higher while the quotes are cheaper for the latter (this is despite the exact amount of work and materials - you can even get them to confirm they are going to use the same gauge wire, etc).
I think they can do all of these tricks but once it becomes known that they are engaging in these shenanigans, it will dilute the value of their credits. So if Costco tries to sell me $100 Uber gift card for 20% off, then I will instantly value that 20% discount to be worth 0% and not purchase that gift card ever.
_generally speaking_ most data science is "we tried this and it improved this metric" the how and why is often poorly understood, and even when it is, it's often later once the system has been working for awhile.
But also I'm not convinced that getting someone to pay more is the same as screwing them over. For example - countries where fines are based on your income, or needs based programs that charge you less when you make less are mostly accepted as social good
> 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."
The difference is the former has an element of being one step removed, and we use that tiny accountability gap to sleep better at night.
The comparison to modern army drone pilots comes to mind... we're now exploding Enemies from the comfort of a playstation controller in a base somewhere in Utah. The PTSD comes in when the operators realize that tiny accountability gap has just been mental gymnastics to suppress what they've really been doing.
The act of feeding the model with data about users' credits necessarily means that they know it's using that as a factor in pricing. What difference does it make if there's an ML model involved?
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...
> People are assuming that some evil mustache-twirling PM/engineer decided to charge users more if they have credits in their account.
> 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.
This is the same thing. The fact that they might be turning a blind eye to why the ML model optimised the way it did doesn't absolve them from responsibility.
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.
This is exactly what it is. They allow you to be racist, exploitative, and discriminatory and then shrug when people start asking questions. When money is to be made people are geniuses, but when that money is questioned suddenly everyone is stupid. They don't know why it does what it does, and in fact nobody knows.
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.
> Like stock market prices, it fluctuates rapidly based on hundreds of factors.
I don’t think many brokers offer different prices to their clients based on attributes. How is this even a remotely valid comparison when you’re saying:
> Sometimes, their fare will be higher than yours, and other times, it will be lower.
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.
-
[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'.
I am often promptly required to be at my job around the same hour. I have started noticing uber charging what would be a 8$ ride up to 15$ when there is no trafic and the drivers are next to me.
Also, some uber drivers, take your ride while literally not being in the car and wasting your time.
Anecdotally, I took an uber one time that was less than 20m from me. After 5 minutes not moving I went to check wth was going on. The driver was talking with other uber drivers. His excuse over text? Police was checking some papers. I literally was unable to get any other drivers because they were the most close to me.
> I avoid Uber like the plague but unfortunately they have destroyed the alternatives.
I use Lyft 99% of the time (and multiple times a week) because I find it to be more reliable (as well as slightly cheaper) than Uber. It doesn't seem destroyed to me.
Anonymity should be a requirement, not an option. All that happens in an "optinal anonymity" scenario is those who use it see a 50+% price hike. Not to cover any costs, but to disincentivize anonymity.
> 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.
It was pretty insane that there was such a huge push with #deleteuber and there were so many stories about how terrible they were as a company for customers and employees. And now after just a few short years people somehow completely forgot or believe somehow it's all good because they changed their CEO.
This report shows multiple drivers all located in the same area (literally, phones next to each other), getting marginally different quotes for the same ride.
What is accounting for these differences?
Taxi industry may have been shitty, but at least the price was transparent. You pay while the meter is running. With Uber/Lyft, it’s a fucking black box.
For all we know, the algorithms learned which drivers tend to take whatever is given to them so they can opt to shave a couple of dollars.
Nitpicking on your one claim that "taxi prices were transparent" - in some countries, maybe. In others, taxi drivers still have very creative ways of scamming their customers, with or without meter. This was actually the main reason I recall that Uber and others used to promote their services, clear upfront prices.
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.
I feel if I open Uber ahead of a planned travel and type in a destination to get an idea on the price, the price is $X. I then open the app back later when I'm ready to travel (say 15 minutes later after packing and leaving the hotel) and the price has gone up (sometimes by quite a bit).
Now maybe I'm just unlucky and the dynamic market prices have gone up every time, but I've never seen the same price or less.
Which makes me wonder if Uber records your interest in using them to get to a destination and then increases the price when you come back after committing to using them for your trip.
I now only open the app and search when I'm ready for the trip.
It might just be a case of the price not staying high for long when it is high.
If every time you notice it's higher than usual, you do this, and notice the price eventually decreasing... but you never switch apps when the price is already normal, and you never not try the other app if you wait... in other words, might just be confirmation bias.
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.
I rolled my uber costs into buying a car, now I go on hikes. I stopped ordering takeout and walk or drive to the restaurant. The fees are approaching 40% of the ticket price now. I'm out.
I’ve experienced the situation where my partner gets lower rates than I do on nearly all ride sharing apps. We’ll open the app at the same time, from the same place, heading to the same destination, and mine will be at least 10% higher. We have very similar ratings.
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.
The ML pricing algos for uber have tons of features solely aimed at maximizing revenues. It wouldn't be a surprise that the HAS_CREDITS field has a +20% impact to ride pricing.
Ride sharing needs to be much more heavily regulated to increase transparency and discourage games like this. Especially in Uber's case, considering their history.
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.
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.
It is not even just credit cards. There are other companies which also offer Uber credits. For instance, if you drop off your Tesla for service in the USA, they offer Uber credits instead of a loaner car since they don't have enough loaners for everyone. I can see Uber totally doing what this article claims because when I had those Uber credits from Tesla service, I was suddenly price insensitive. It was not like I was going to use Lyft when I had Uber credits that were going to expire at the end of the day. So I ordered myself Uber Black to/from the office with the credit.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
For a brief period, I worked Uber(eats) and DoorDash at the same time. I'm absolutely convinced that the two services speak to each other on the backend (or perhaps monitor each other on your phone) and structure the orders they offer you in such a way as to thwart you efforts to double-app. Uber would be utter silent for 10-20 minutes, and then send an order right after accepting a DoorDash one, and generally in the opposite direction.
In general, I do wonder if/when all of the slimy anti-competitive, anti-labor stuff these companies are doing will come out. I'm not holding my breath for jail-time, but boy, would it be nice.
While I'm here, it sure would be nice if someone were to spin up a fediverse/decentralized alternative that municipalities could adopt and interconnect.
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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.
Wow that's crazy. Dozens of newspaper reported on this. Did all those smartphone-carrying journalist repeat the claim without trying it for themselves? Thanks for pointing that out.
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.
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.
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 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.
I am well protected
> 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.
This type of attitude sometimes makes the world a worse place. If everyone has this attitude, the system can break down.
> I rarely rate drivers positively
Drivers live or die by their rating. Refusing to give good reviews harms the drivers who are already barely scraping by. This is a very good example of how you can cause real world harm with by trying to game the system for yourself.
> Drivers live or die by their rating. Refusing to give good reviews harms the drivers who are already barely scraping by.
I drive on Uber part-time. In my city at least, rating is not such a big deal. The vast vast majority of people give 5 stars ratings (i'm talking about 99% of ratings).
I assume there are some people who only give ratings when the service was exceptionally good or exceptionally bad, or would otherwise consider 3 stars as a fair rating for a normal experience. Let's call there honest raters. As a driver, i don't think honest raters can have such a big impact on me, because the platform is designed so that there's no preference to always match honest raters to some particular drivers. Their honest ratings will be spread more or less uniformly among drivers.
And, if we want to apply Kantian logic and think "but what would happen if everybody did the same?", well, Uber is a live system too: if more people would become honest raters, then the ceiling of what's the minimum average rating you need to have as a driver would be lowered accordingly. Uber needs drivers too. It needs to keep a healthy balance of available drivers and available passengers. If either of the two gets too low, if would lose the other part in short time.
> I drive on Uber part-time. In my city at least, rating is not such a big deal. The vast vast majority of people give 5 stars ratings (i'm talking about 99% of ratings).
Same here, and all that means the scale is different. 4.70 is I drive on Uber part-time. In my city at least, rating is not such a big deal. The vast vast majority of people give 5 stars ratings (i'm talking about 99% of ratings), 4.80 is bad, 4.90 is good, 4.95+ is very friendly. I no longer am assigned any drivers below 4.85 because I started consistently cancelling every driver I got below 4.8.
I appreciate your input, thanks.
> Drivers live or die by their rating. Refusing to give good reviews harms the drivers who are already barely scraping by.
This is one of the two reasons why I don't use Uber. The rating thing amounts to emotional blackmail, and that's not a game I'm willing to play.
It also means that driver ratings are meaningless.
I recently got some help from my banker dealing with sorting out accounts following a death. When we finished she told me she'd appreciate a review on the survey I'd likely get, but that only 4s and 5s (or 9s-10s) count. In the end I didn't get a survey but it left a bit of a weird taste, I've worked with her for 8-10 years, she seems good at her job, and I've never really had any complaints.
Probably Net Promotor Score.
Some systems are worth breaking down. On a macro-level, I think it's safe to assume that drivers are already being maximally exploited by the algorithm.
> This is a very good example of how you can cause real world harm with by trying to game the system for yourself.
Isn't that the rule that Uber itself already imposes on its customers and drivers?
> If everyone has this attitude, the system can break down.
Yes, that is why "I like how people [in comments] are keen to change the world", I don't want everyone to be as lazy as I am.
> Refusing to give good reviews harms the drivers who are already barely scraping by. This is a very good example of how you can cause real world harm with by trying to game the system for yourself.
No uber rider owe feedback at all, even if there is no gain of skipping it..
I would understand your argument if I were giving negative feedback on purpose for good drivers, which I consider a false testimony and a lie, but every user have all the right to skip reviewing, owing no more than the ride fees.
> This type of attitude sometimes makes the world a worse place. If everyone has this attitude, the system can break down.
Its just literally the attitude of uber itself, were not talking about some social security system
> This type of attitude sometimes makes the world a worse place. If everyone has this attitude, the system can break down
Or: bad actors speed up the rate at which the system improves to not rely on the goodness of individuals in order to operate.
Interesting take.
Assumes we all benefit from playing into the system Uber created.
Maybe true on a local maximum.
But is it true on the global one?
No one actually knows what the global maximum is, or how to get there, outside of any specifics that religion may or may not tell you.
A "global maximum" closely parallels the definition of faith. It's the maximal good for the maximal number of people, and a real destination for some (surely not all are worthy of it, as long as human evil exists). How we get there, what it is, who actually makes it there, on what basis, what's preventing its realization at present, how to overcome such obstacles --- these are the questions that religions (including secular humanism) answer.
That may be the case but this can be seen as 'Hate the game not the player'. Just because folks are in this position doesn't mean you should be complicit in its continuation as it stands.
I mean I get it, you end up hurting those that have the least power. It is a rough predicament to be in.
> This type of attitude sometimes makes the world a worse place. If everyone has this attitude, the system can break down.
Any system like this entails a set of individual incentives. If following those incentives would lead the system to break down, the system is already broken.
"Drivers live or die by their rating" - really??? I have never given the drivers rating a moments thought. Do you seriously cancel rides because the driver doesn't have 5 stars??
If a driver's average rating falls below 4.6 Uber typically removes them from the platform. A rating of less than 5 stars is treated similarly to if a customer reported a driver for poor service.
Ahh, OK I had no idea that was a thing. I thought it was just for customer decisions.
I guarantee their algorithms factor in average number of riders who don’t rate anyone lol. Maybe they weight them. Maybe they grade everyone on a bell curve. Maybe they use it in C-suite meetings to determine strategies. I can just about guarantee they don’t ignore it, though.
They’re a tech company;a decent rating algorithm should be one of the most likely things for them to excel in, or they’d just lose to any company that does because all the good drivers they’re dropping are immediately signing up to work for a competing service.
tl;dr It is in ride-services’ best to retain good drivers, no?
In NYC at least, Uber has become the de facto way of getting a private driver to take you places.
Until that meaningfully changes I don’t think they care about anything but earnings.
Interestingly, that attitude is what allowed them to come in and replace yellow cabs as the de facto driver for hire option.
> Do you seriously cancel rides ..
It's also possible that the algorithm behind the scenes allocates drivers to demand based on ( proximity AND driver rating ).
If so then lower ranked drivers would be 'starved' out by higher ranked drivers.
Yes, rating is used for prioritization when proximity is equalish
Drivers with below 4 star ratings used to get dropped from Uber and Lyft. Not sure how a non-rating affects their score, but I'd assume the worst.
A non rating doesn't directly affect their score. But if a driver doesn't get plenty of five star reviews, they'll get dropped from the app because there are always people who give bad reviews because they had a bad day.
I'm not sure if any of this actually saves you money. If anything, it may drive the algorithm to pair you with less than stellar drivers. In a customer retention phase, which Uber is in right now, the algorithm should aim to pair good clients with good drivers and poor clients with poor drivers, just to protect the repeat business.
I'm convinced the person you're replying to is right. At my last job, all of us took separate Ubers every day. I started cancelling every driver below X rating. After a while, Ive ended up only being assigned drivers far above X, while my colleagues still got low rated drivers often enough (they never cancelled based on rating). My own rating wasn't higher than theirs, and I was a worse customer in that I used Uber less than they did.
I don't know if this saves you money, but if it is, you are certainly working pretty hard for it.
I do the same and it's really not more work. All the steps come rather smoothly when you have the goal in mind of not benefiting the app in any way.
all steps, like .. fiddling with virtual cards, retrying transactions, occasionally cancelling when searching for a driver ... this seems like waay too much effort.
Exactly
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.
Do you have info, anecdotal or otherwise, on how much you think you save per ride in total and relative amounts? That might sound like a lot, but really I'm just wondering if you can estimate "I think I save about $X dollars on a fare that would cost $Y dollars otherwise."
By leaving the app before booking, I often get 10%-20% off (it claims rates went low, of course it's just a retention discount), not sure about others.
It doesn't work everytime btw.
Yeah, and any individual vote doesn't make a difference, so why take the time to vote?
I don't know man... saving a few bucks on the average HN 300k+ salary doesn't make a difference, but let people have their principles. Isn't that the source of the original hacker mentality and the stuff we like to celebrate here?
>> I like how people in comments are keen to change the world, but I - more realisticly - only focus on...
> but let people have their principles.
I believe I did..?
You did, I was complimenting you and threading on magic_hamster
Whoops, gotta clean my glasses.
> saving a few bucks on the average HN 300k+ salary
I’m pretty sure there are plenty of Europeans/etc. here..
Wouldn’t / shouldn’t this heavily penalize you? Like, what I want to optimize for is that when there’s little Uber capacity and many requests, that I get prioritized and get put as close to the front of the queue as possible. Which is why I tend to stick to just one app (Uber), and try to have a high rating.
But idk if it’s doing anything. At least back when Uber had tiers (platinum / diamond) it was more obvious the perks you get with more use (like with airlines), but now that they dropped those I’m feeling less inclined to keep using just Uber vs a mix of all apps and picking cheapest.
The system cannot penalize the working party in the same way it penalizes the paying party, if you are an easy customer whi never complain, always seem satisfied, would ride anyway no matter how high is the current rate, we might as well assign you any driver.
If you are a difficult customer who is rarely satisfied and complain of most inconveniences, you will get the better drivers.
Because simply, the algorthm is prioritizing sales, not nice and chill riders.
> 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 don't live in the US, and over here a driver rating below 4.8 guarantees you a rollercoaster ride by an angry man. I've cancelled enough times straight after being assigned such a driver that I now only get drivers with near-perfect ratings. Doesn't take any longer either.
It's sad that it's come to this, but you've really got to make the algorithm work for you.
I'm not in the US, and over here, any driver with a rating unf
I like to imagine you were in an uber paired with a 4.6 driver and the ride ended poorly with the unfinished sentence at the end of your reply.
> 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.
Just tried this, didn't get any notification.
It is a heuristic, it doesn't work 100% of times for me.
I also don't know if ithas other factors, like region, number of rides, etc..
Thank you for these tips.
I do similar to you. I wonder if not rating is limiting your gains relative to giving (gasps) four or three star ratings.
I work on freelancing platforms, I know how harmful is it for me to get a 4.9/5 star rating.
I would prefer not to harm the driver, unless he was a dick or was driving a garbage can, I would then rate it 1-star with a clear conscience.
Your cynicism is commendable.
thanks!
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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.
0. https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/verify/verify-does-uber-ch...
> Probably false, like the urban legend that Uber charges more when a device's battery is low [0].
That article certainly doesn’t prove that was an urban legend. Uber built an entire system to serve fake data to government officials
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-f2971465-73d2-4932-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...
They were almost kicked out of the App Store for building a system to deceive Apple’s employees, too:
https://financialpost.com/technology/personal-tech/uber-was-...
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.
These claims provide precisely zero evidence that Uber ever used battery life as a pricing variable.
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're all about things way shadier then battery-level-based pricing.
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.
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The fact that its unfalsifiable is the problem. They can (and why wouldn't they) run all sorts of shenanigans with their pricing algorithms.
Pricing algorithms should be not be private. Free markets depend on transparent pricing.
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.
That example is literally in the article though. Clearly it’s not enough to convince OP.
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
In the article, the same thing is later tried with the user’s phone and the phone of a friend in sequence, at the same time.
I see. That seems like pretty good evidence then.
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.
> I see. That seems like pretty good evidence then.
Two data points, one gathered immediately after another for the same route from a separate device, from a provider known to track demande and use "surge pricing"?
Ah, but which phone checked first? I could see the second request coming back with a higher price due to increased demand in the area.
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?
> choosing to not maximize profits
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.
> 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 stole tips and got away with it. The precedent has been set. The "hammer" you're talking about hasn't existed for over a decade.
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
>likely to bring the hammer down when discovered
People would forget a week later and continue to use the app. I think that saying is a bit naive to the post antitrust capitalist world
> 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.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/uber-and-execs-f...
[2] https://www.hotrec.eu/en/policies/_airbnb_fined_on_the_balea...
My comment was about the usage of the term unfalsifiable, which means something specific that was being misunderstood.
I don't know whether they are charging more when users have credits in there account. It seems plausible I guess.
Here are some plausible reasons why it may not be the case:
- If Uber's analysis determined that the best price to charge to maximize profit is independent of whether or not the user has credits
- Because predatory practices would generate bad press and push users to competitors, which would reduce profits
Corporations do not have a legal requirement to maximize profits.
Like in the article?
> 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.
> You don’t get to tell Walmart they have to give a breakdown of everything that went into a pricing decision.
If Walmart would have a custom price for everyone that walks in based on how much Walmart thinks they can afford, then yes: absolutely there should be more transparency.
Those situations aren’t the same: Walmart charges everyone the same price and they advertise those prices so they’re stable over some time. Uber has multiple sources of dynamic behavior and so I think it’s reasonable to demand visibility, similar to how an airplane fare breaks down the portions which are demand based from the things which are static.
> Walmart charges everyone the same price
This... isn't true. The same item at a Walmart near San Francisco will have a different price than in nowhere, Kansas.
But the person I was responding to was saying that the reasons for a price need to be transparent, which I think is orthogonal to whether a company has universal same-price-for-everyone guarantees.
And most companies do not charge the same thing to everyone, even within a market. Think about AAA and senior discounts, loyalty programs, etc.
It’s true in a market for Walmart but not Uber, and the same is true for everything else you mentioned – senior discounts don’t vary per-person. I think that’s a fundamental difference since private per-customer pricing opens up the possibility for the kind of abuses which Uber has been accused of repeatedly.
I worked in the pricing team at the time. There was essentially no personalization. The biggest factors were your current location, where you're going, the time of the day, current demand level around you, and current supply of drivers around you. Promotions were slightly more personalized but battery level was not used.
I suppose it's also possible that they are taking hundreds of data points including battery life and credits, and training some ML. Then they don't even really know what the algorithm is, other than whatever the weights they are feeding it.
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.
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.
And yet, individual cabbies are enterprising enough to hoodwink individual passengers day-in, day-out, and it's all part of the game.
When I go to the supermarket, I get one price for bananas and my friend gets that same price. I don't pay 1 dollar while he pays 1.10. All the customers have the same pricing. This is the key difference.
If every customer has a different price, like Uber does, that opens up pandora's box. Naturally customers will start wondering about patterns and what they can do to lower their price. They might speculate if people of race X are given a slightly higher price on average, or what other physical characteristics might play a role.
Your supermarket doesn't play that game.
You may pay $1.10 and your friend pays $1.10 but gets a 10¢ discount with a coupon. It’s the same thing economically.
There have been government hearings in the US about grocery stores price-gouging over the rate of inflation. So yes?
Mass consumer products generally don't discriminate per user like that.
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.
Well, generally, they tell everyone the price. In this case, they're only telling you the price, and that price might change tomorrow, or in 5 minutes, or if you move 5 blocks to the south, or if the local commuter train gets delayed, or... By how much, for each input? Who knows. Hence, the concern about the lack of transparency.
> Free markets depend on transparent pricing.
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."
My latest Uber receipt reads:
> 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.
Were there tolls on your trip?
Driver pay gets adjusted this way too. Lyft and Uber. No tolls, traffic jams (at least) can cause this.
Given enough time Uber will just look like an another taxi service I guess.
Yes, except the driver will never have his child in a car seat in the front apologetically. And the passenger will pay in excess, but to the stock market and not the driver.
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!! Yet "free markets" seemed to work out anyway.
Go to an auction house, or a swap meet. Haggle for prices, against other buyers, negotiate with sellers. Approach any salesman in a business with unpublished prices (B2B especially.) Try to purchase a home or a vehicle, middleman or not.
Think about it, and you'll discover that pricing algorithms have been subject to human whim since before the invention of money.
The amazing innovation of markets was indeed, up-front price tags, fairness to all buyers, yet any underlying algorithm was still private and proprietary, so the consumer at a Safeway doesn't really have any idea what his carton of milk costs or why he's paying $7 for it.
The problem is price fixing, right? Milk, really?
> Free markets depend on transparent pricing.
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.
But two people in the same store at the same time will always see the same price for the can of coke.
Not if one of them has a coupon or is in the rewards program.
(Or has food stamps.)
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.
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.
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If you have something to say, say it.
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What? How?
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.
> no way to hold them accountable if they do
Hold them accountable for what exactly?! Uber provides a service - how much it costs depends on many factors like where you live, time of the day and many other factors. You open the app to see what their services cost and you can then choose to use their services or not.
There is no price transparency in many businesses. Try buying airline tickets online - first try at your own home. Then take your laptop and go to a zipcode where one of your friends lives that is much better off than you financially and try the same thing. Next, do the same but go to a different friend's house, one that perhaps lives in a zipcode that is a lot less affluent and see what happens there. Then repeat this same test but use MacBook Pro vs some shitty HP running Windows 7 and see what the difference is. Next, get NordVPN and get your self parked elsewhere and see what happens with the pricing... It is quite silly to even discuss "price transparency" in 2024 mates :)
> There is no price transparency in many businesses. Try buying airline tickets online
People hate airline pricing as well, so I'm not sure that makes the point you think it does. I don't see why "lots of business do something people don't like" somehow means people should stop disliking it.
> It is quite silly to even discuss "price transparency" in 2024 mates :)
If you think it's silly to spend time discussing it, you're not under any obligation to. There's nothing wrong with people who do think it's an issue discussing it either though, and I don't think anyone concerned by it is going to be particularly dissuaded by just asserting that they shouldn't be.
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.
After I gave my 5,000th ride on Uber I had a beer. I thought. I pondered. I devised the iniquity experiment.
(1) N drivers authorized on the Rideshare platform are engaged.
(2) these N drivers drive simultaneously and in a similar geographic preference- as if they live in the same neighborhood, but also are optimizing as drivers do. And yet drawn home.
(3) pricing, earnings, etc. are recorded per driver and compared across drivers on the Rideshare platform(s).
Now we engage the experimental component. With N drivers we can have N/2 drivers engage in behavior A or behavior B. Then, when the Rideshare platform denies they do this or that depending on that or this, there is good evidence that is not the case. Statistical evidence. Tallyho, bandits!
I believe data from all New York City trips from companies like Lyft and Uber since 2019 [1] can be downloaded from Taxi & Limousine Commission [2]. This data appears to include information such as the fare, date and time and TLC taxi zones for the pickup and dropoff [3].
I wonder if there is enough granularity in this data to make a determination if there's a large discrepancy/variation in fare in certain taxi zones at the same time with Uber, compared with Lyft or other competitors.
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/tlc/downloads/pdf/trip_record_use...
[2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/tlc/about/tlc-trip-record-data.page
[3] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/tlc/downloads/pdf/data_dictionary...
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.
We wish you a nice day.
> 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?)
> Claims like this go viral because they're practically unfalsifiable
How in the world is this unfalsifiable? Can't you just have two Uber accounts and cross check their prices?
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.
How the term is used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
From Karl Popper: "The only way to verify a claim such as "All swans are white" would be if one could theoretically observe all swans, which is not possible. On the other hand, the falsifiability requirement for an anomalous instance, such as the observation of a single black swan, is theoretically reasonable and sufficient to logically falsify the claim."
How is this different from what I am saying?
I'm not saying what you think I am saying. The theory that "Uber price is always independent of whether the rider has credits" is indeed falsifiable, and the experiment in the anecdote seems to do so.
The opposite claim, "that Ubers do not always charge the same rate" -- the one that logically flows from falsifying the first -- is the claim that is unfalsifiable.
Is it a valid criticism of the claim? I would generally agree with you and say not really.
> or by multiple phones looking at the same route implying increased demand (the latter search might display a higher price)
This post sounded like it's saying that the later search is the one with the lower price.
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?
It reminds me of legends: "YouTube listens to you and then recommends videos based on your offline chats"
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!
Seems very falsifiable, as indeed the author tested. Get two people to get the same ride. Check pricing. Repeat.
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.
The author's test proves the theory; it doesn't falsify the theory. The test could only prove the theory or fail to prove it. Failing to prove is not the same as falsifying.
Not sure if you are intending to disagree with me. But I agree with you: it is a falsifiable claim, which is good.
If we're discussing falsifiability and logical reasoning, perhaps let's get more specific with terms. The author has a hypothesis, rather than a theory. "Theory" would be a lot more rigorous than just conjecturing this one thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis
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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 do find chatgpt is helpful in laying out the formulas you should you in the context that they should be used in. Something I personally know I have no business doing.
... At the same time, I also am aware of how hilariously dumb chat GPT can be in deep technical contexts. I've taken to saying that when it comes to a technical topic, chatGPT will confidently tell you the wrong thing to do 50% of the time, but that's fine because it will give you the terms and context you can use to audit its solution yourself. Even if you don't understand the answers you can easily have chat gpt explain the gaps, again, 50%, but giving real information contextualizes the conversation better. I would expect this to improve accuracy, and my personal experience bares this out.
There was a brief window of time where the strongest chess players were chimeras, humans who assessed AI suggestions. Quickly even they found themselves outperformed by engines.
I suspect this is happening here as well. And I also suspect its going to take a good deal longer.
Interesting - you're not logged into Maps?
The rideshare tab in Maps gives me time/distance/traffic estimates and no prices. Whether I'm logged in, or Incognito. No prices unless I tap "Open App ->"
There is no rideshare tab in the desktop version, only tried it on my Android.
I'm looking at it now, but it no longer shows Uber as an option for me, only Lyft, and it doesn't show prices. I guess that was short-lived. Last time I used it was a month or so ago.
Interestingly, Uber and Waymo have partnered in some markets, for example Austin/Atlanta, where riders must use the Uber app to summon an autonomous Waymo:
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/09/waymo-and-uber-expand-partner...
In my market, Maps is showing me options for Lyft or Waymo autos only. However, Lyft is co-branded with scooters and e-bikes, so if I opened that app instead, I'd be presented with even more options.
So, our Maps experience may depend on the market and other variables, which brings us back to TFA's topic, I suppose.
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!).
Surge pricing is literally just supply and demand. It tries to ensure the number of people who need a taxi is the same as the number of people who drive. A glut in drivers decreases driver earnings while a glut in riders will cause long wait times.
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.
You're making the SWE responsible for compliance with consumer protection laws. That's not going to work.
It is a failure of capitalism that we need to force certain people to behave ethically, taking the role as umpire for a broken system.
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 suspect it's less apathetic than that; more "sweet, this'll get me a bonus!"
The devs might just adapt to the users who take an Uber to the next union meeting. People know about the consequences of this kind of "freelancing" but still don't care enough to adapt their consumption.
It is not a single dollar worth it to them and people don't seem to see the connection between their own working conditions and their demands for consumption.
Sure, Uber also destroyed or at least challenged a lot of taxi monopolies. For that alone it was surely worth it. But I think "abusing" the price flexibility of customers is anything nefarious as they certainly do the same.
Might come down to two variables:
- do they believe they're doing a job that is otherwise net positive to society or their users ?
- how hard would it be to successfully argue against this feature getting implemented ?
For instance I'd they think Uber is saving humanity but this feature would cost their whole career if they went hard against it, the remorse would be negligible.
For others it could be the last straw breaking the camel's back.
In general I think we're turning the blind eye to many shitty practices if we assume it's a small issue in the grand scheme of things. I mean, we wouldn't have so many dark patterns and spam emails from almost every companies we interact with if it wasn't the case.
When was the last time you went to tell your marketing department to dial it down ?
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.
I don’t think it’s fair to be so black and white. Morals are a luxury item. The rest of us need to work somewhere.
There is one Uber, there are untold numbers of other companies/businesses operating more reputably.
They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: health insurance.
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.
How is giving an elected union official a seat in the board room seizing other people's stuff?
You need share holders' approval to join the board. Today's markets immediately punish a company which supports union. So forcing your way is the only practical way to get a union board seat
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
Lots of things work this way though.
1) Airlines charge more to fly direct from A -> B while charging less for someone to fly from A -> B -> C. Some people try skiplagging to game the system but you run the risk of getting banned by the airline if you do that.
2) Another hilarious experience I have had is when I was paying things for my wedding. Some vendors (florists, cake makers, etc) will charge outrageous rates if you tell them it's for a wedding. But they will charge very reasonable rates if you claim it is just for a non-wedding family event (for the same amount of flowers, same size/layers of cake, etc).
3) A similar thing I have been warned about is electricians charging more if you claim you want an EVSE installed for your new Tesla as opposed to having just a regular NEMA 14-50 outlet installed in your garage. For the former, they will quote much higher while the quotes are cheaper for the latter (this is despite the exact amount of work and materials - you can even get them to confirm they are going to use the same gauge wire, etc).
I think they can do all of these tricks but once it becomes known that they are engaging in these shenanigans, it will dilute the value of their credits. So if Costco tries to sell me $100 Uber gift card for 20% off, then I will instantly value that 20% discount to be worth 0% and not purchase that gift card ever.
_generally speaking_ most data science is "we tried this and it improved this metric" the how and why is often poorly understood, and even when it is, it's often later once the system has been working for awhile.
But also I'm not convinced that getting someone to pay more is the same as screwing them over. For example - countries where fines are based on your income, or needs based programs that charge you less when you make less are mostly accepted as social good
Those things are not inherently as arbitrary and are also much more transparent which makes them hardly comparable in any meaningful way..
This is like physical shops offering different prices to clients based on how they are dressed and other indirect indicators.
> 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."
The difference is the former has an element of being one step removed, and we use that tiny accountability gap to sleep better at night.
The comparison to modern army drone pilots comes to mind... we're now exploding Enemies from the comfort of a playstation controller in a base somewhere in Utah. The PTSD comes in when the operators realize that tiny accountability gap has just been mental gymnastics to suppress what they've really been doing.
The act of feeding the model with data about users' credits necessarily means that they know it's using that as a factor in pricing. What difference does it make if there's an ML model involved?
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...
> People are assuming that some evil mustache-twirling PM/engineer decided to charge users more if they have credits in their account.
> 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.
This is the same thing. The fact that they might be turning a blind eye to why the ML model optimised the way it did doesn't absolve them from responsibility.
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.
Thats almost the same thing isnt it? The motivation is to charge as much as possible to each user, how it's implemented isn't really relevant
Is it less evil if an unsupervised process does it?
It already is.
Yes, ML models are for accountability laundering. More news at 11.
This is exactly what it is. They allow you to be racist, exploitative, and discriminatory and then shrug when people start asking questions. When money is to be made people are geniuses, but when that money is questioned suddenly everyone is stupid. They don't know why it does what it does, and in fact nobody knows.
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.
> Like stock market prices, it fluctuates rapidly based on hundreds of factors.
I don’t think many brokers offer different prices to their clients based on attributes. How is this even a remotely valid comparison when you’re saying:
> Sometimes, their fare will be higher than yours, and other times, it will be lower.
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.
-
[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'.
I am often promptly required to be at my job around the same hour. I have started noticing uber charging what would be a 8$ ride up to 15$ when there is no trafic and the drivers are next to me.
Also, some uber drivers, take your ride while literally not being in the car and wasting your time. Anecdotally, I took an uber one time that was less than 20m from me. After 5 minutes not moving I went to check wth was going on. The driver was talking with other uber drivers. His excuse over text? Police was checking some papers. I literally was unable to get any other drivers because they were the most close to me.
> I avoid Uber like the plague but unfortunately they have destroyed the alternatives.
I use Lyft 99% of the time (and multiple times a week) because I find it to be more reliable (as well as slightly cheaper) than Uber. It doesn't seem destroyed to me.
Anonymity should be a requirement, not an option. All that happens in an "optinal anonymity" scenario is those who use it see a 50+% price hike. Not to cover any costs, but to disincentivize anonymity.
Solid point.
> 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.
It was pretty insane that there was such a huge push with #deleteuber and there were so many stories about how terrible they were as a company for customers and employees. And now after just a few short years people somehow completely forgot or believe somehow it's all good because they changed their CEO.
I’m not sure if the story here has any merits. But what I do know is: there needs to be more transparency.
https://youtu.be/OEXJmNj6SPk
This report shows multiple drivers all located in the same area (literally, phones next to each other), getting marginally different quotes for the same ride.
What is accounting for these differences?
Taxi industry may have been shitty, but at least the price was transparent. You pay while the meter is running. With Uber/Lyft, it’s a fucking black box.
For all we know, the algorithms learned which drivers tend to take whatever is given to them so they can opt to shave a couple of dollars.
Nitpicking on your one claim that "taxi prices were transparent" - in some countries, maybe. In others, taxi drivers still have very creative ways of scamming their customers, with or without meter. This was actually the main reason I recall that Uber and others used to promote their services, clear upfront prices.
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.
Completely anecdotal.
I feel if I open Uber ahead of a planned travel and type in a destination to get an idea on the price, the price is $X. I then open the app back later when I'm ready to travel (say 15 minutes later after packing and leaving the hotel) and the price has gone up (sometimes by quite a bit).
Now maybe I'm just unlucky and the dynamic market prices have gone up every time, but I've never seen the same price or less.
Which makes me wonder if Uber records your interest in using them to get to a destination and then increases the price when you come back after committing to using them for your trip.
I now only open the app and search when I'm ready for the trip.
Anecdotally, I find if I go to Lyft, then go to Uber, and back to Lyft 30s later, I often get an updated decreased price.
It might just be a case of the price not staying high for long when it is high.
If every time you notice it's higher than usual, you do this, and notice the price eventually decreasing... but you never switch apps when the price is already normal, and you never not try the other app if you wait... in other words, might just be confirmation bias.
Not surprised. Uber doesn’t exactly have a reputation of being the most ethical company out there.
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.
Point stands they weren't doing well over here either during those years.
I rolled my uber costs into buying a car, now I go on hikes. I stopped ordering takeout and walk or drive to the restaurant. The fees are approaching 40% of the ticket price now. I'm out.
I have a bunch of credit from the Costco thing and haven’t noticed any changes in pricing on my usual routes.
I’ve experienced the situation where my partner gets lower rates than I do on nearly all ride sharing apps. We’ll open the app at the same time, from the same place, heading to the same destination, and mine will be at least 10% higher. We have very similar ratings.
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.
The ML pricing algos for uber have tons of features solely aimed at maximizing revenues. It wouldn't be a surprise that the HAS_CREDITS field has a +20% impact to ride pricing.
The Oriental Rug Salesman as a Service: "For you my friend, special price!"...
With apologies for stereotyping.
Ride sharing needs to be much more heavily regulated to increase transparency and discourage games like this. Especially in Uber's case, considering their history.
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.
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.
It is not even just credit cards. There are other companies which also offer Uber credits. For instance, if you drop off your Tesla for service in the USA, they offer Uber credits instead of a loaner car since they don't have enough loaners for everyone. I can see Uber totally doing what this article claims because when I had those Uber credits from Tesla service, I was suddenly price insensitive. It was not like I was going to use Lyft when I had Uber credits that were going to expire at the end of the day. So I ordered myself Uber Black to/from the office with the credit.
My credit card gives me monthly Uber credits.
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?)
Not an Uber card, just Amex.
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.
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.
Anecdotally, can confirm.
And the trick of course is to first get the deal (which lasts for 1-2 weeks typically), and then add credits.
I can't wait for Uber to get checked by robotaxi.
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.
That's not how Spotify payouts work.
Haven’t touched Uber in years and always try to use the city’s local service wherever available. Its usually more convenient anyway.
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.
For a brief period, I worked Uber(eats) and DoorDash at the same time. I'm absolutely convinced that the two services speak to each other on the backend (or perhaps monitor each other on your phone) and structure the orders they offer you in such a way as to thwart you efforts to double-app. Uber would be utter silent for 10-20 minutes, and then send an order right after accepting a DoorDash one, and generally in the opposite direction.
In general, I do wonder if/when all of the slimy anti-competitive, anti-labor stuff these companies are doing will come out. I'm not holding my breath for jail-time, but boy, would it be nice.
While I'm here, it sure would be nice if someone were to spin up a fediverse/decentralized alternative that municipalities could adopt and interconnect.
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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.
[1] https://www.brusselstimes.com/449143/uber-fares-allegedly-li...
Wow that's crazy. Dozens of newspaper reported on this. Did all those smartphone-carrying journalist repeat the claim without trying it for themselves? Thanks for pointing that out.
Anyway, I have not used them since Lyft came out, for a variety of other reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber
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.
Full self-driving will kill it
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.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-gr...
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.
A great way to fight dynamic pricing is to force companies to compete with the government.
Uber is going to have a lot of fun pricing a market where the bus is 10x cheaper and faster than the Uber thanks to dedicated lanes.
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.