Uber Starts Charging What It Thinks You're Willing To Pay (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Uber drivers have been complaining that the gap between the fare a rider pays and what the driver receives is getting wider. After months of unsatisfying answers, Uber is providing an explanation: It's charging some passengers more because it needs the extra cash. The company detailed for the first time in an interview with Bloomberg a new pricing system that's been in testing for months in certain cities. On Friday, Uber acknowledged to drivers the discrepancy between their compensation and what riders pay. The new fare system is called "route-based pricing," and it charges customers based on what it predicts they're willing to pay. It's a break from the past, when Uber calculated fares using a combination of mileage, time and multipliers based on geographic demand. Daniel Graf, Uber's head of product, said the company applies machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders' propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.

Comments

Uber - as a job, naaaa

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I kind of lilked Uber when I was too sick to drive myself to the doctor's appointments. The drivers were usually pretty willing to give me an extra hand. Then I noticed something on my home LAN reports. A lot of connections to a HTTPS address I didn't recognize from my phone. A look up of the domain name came back with a private registration, and the IP addresses were allocated to large ISPs without sub-allocations. The certificate details weren't too helpful either.

So I started deleting apps from my phone. When I deleted Uber, and did a bare metal reload, those connections stopped. Since I didn't do a bare metal reload before deleting everything else, I can't say Uber was the cause. But SOMEONE was sure wanting to know something fairly often - twice to four times an hour.

Aside from the fact we already know from other reports that Uber likes to slurp data, and aside from avoiding rules largely placed as protectionism for Taxi services, I found that Uber did kinda meet my needs.

But not putting aside other considerations, I think Uber Corporation is being evil.