Slashdot Mirror
Uber Knows Exactly When You'll Pay Surge Pricing (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Uber has figured out exactly when you are more likely to pay double or triple the cost of your ride: when your phone battery is low. Uber's head of economic research, Keith Chen, recently told NPR on an episode of The Hidden Brain podcast that people are willing to accept up to 9.9 times surge pricing if their phones are about to go dead. Data about user batteries is collected because the app uses that information to know when to switch into low-power mode. The idea being: If you really need to get where you're going, you'll pay just about anything (or at least 9.9 times anything) to ensure you're getting a ride home and won't be stranded. A person with a more fully charged device has time to wait and see if the surge pricing goes down.The company insists that it won't use this information against you.
No, they're cheap because they're burning through piles of cash from their investors and a (limited, but still large) pool of drivers willing to work a few months before they realize they got a bum deal. Both will run dry, at which point the TNC experiment will end.
For a really good discussion on the economics from the driver's side, check out any of the recent reddit threads in Austin discussing Uber and Lyft's decision to cut off 10k drivers and split town. Here's one to get you started: https://www.reddit.com/r/Austi...
-Chris