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".
In your hurry to donate time of your life pro bono to Uber’s PR team, you might have missed that I never claimed they did. The argument I did make is that when you’re talking about a company which has put considerable effort into building tools specifically to deceive governmental authorities and break its legal agreements you can’t rely on a small unscientific study to say anything doesn’t happen. “Uber doesn’t price based on battery life”, “Uber disables price manipulation for known journalists and their cohabitants”, and “Uber disabled price manipulation features after reports went wildly viral” are indistinguishable in that experiment, and there’s nothing like enough data to even begin to make the argument that the claim could not possibly be true.
Put another way, if I say someone cheated at cards and you say that’s an urban legend because they were never caught, knowing that the alleged cheat was Bernie Madoff might change your confidence in that belief because you know without a doubt that he was willing to cheat in even more serious areas.
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"?
> 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.
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.
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.
Not the same because coupons are public and equal opportunity. It's not like you get coupons for being white or being a man, but with Uber you could actually pay less for those things. Who knows?
Again, this is fundamentally different because the content of those coupons are not proprietary. I think we all recognize there's a difference between a dynamic price black box and a coupon.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Free markets depend on a large number of competitors and low barriers to entry. Transparent pricing is unlikely to make much of a difference with Uber.
I mean, there are no surprise post-ride fees or anything. They're quoting you what the actual price is, and they're free to quote whatever they want for whatever reasons they want. Nobody's forcing you to agree to it. There's nothing stopping you from getting a competitive quote from Lyft by simply switching apps on the phone. Or by calling a cab company. Also there's nothing that keeps you from choosing to wait for a bus.
*Edit: Per Uber's help page there are exceptions to the up-front price quote actually being charged, but they are exceptions. My basic point that it's still a free market stands. "The upfront price you’re shown may change due to a number of circumstances, which may include adding stops, updating your destination, significant changes to the route or duration of the trip, or you pass through a toll that was not factored into your upfront price. In addition, you may incur wait time fees for the time you take to get to the car at the pickup or multi-stop fees for time spent at an on-trip stop."
> Due to unanticipated tolls or surcharges on this trip, we’ve adjusted your upfront fare to reflect the actually incurred charges. Please see the receipt breakdown for details.
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.
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.
The question isn’t whether people like or dislike something, the comment I commented on stated that free markets depend on transparent pricing which in my humble opinion cannot be further from the truth.
Yes I know, and I explained that the person who was confused by the way your comment was worded. We continued discussing the issue after that, and personally, it doesn't matter to me whether it's a strict requirement of the free market or not; there are plenty of things that are theoretically not incompatible with a free market that I think are bad, and this is one of them.
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.
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...