The strategy I've seen in response to this incentive scheme is to work 4 14-hour days, ensuring that they hit the incentive no matter what. The money made off the actual ride is peanuts ($1/ride, maybe) so they absolutely need to finish 15 rides to get $75. Working 4 days a week, 16 days a month nets the driver $1200/month. Which is an incredible income by Indian standards considering most graduates from good colleges make a lot less.
With GPS, drivers can't do this.
Padding by 300% is a challenge, but a bit isn't.
This comparison strikes me as bizarre. The medallion racket is lobbying politicians to use the force of the law to prevent competitors from doing business. What discordorama describes is paying people money to install and sign into your app. This is... either a poorly designed incentive system that was then fixed, or a clever campaign that gets a lot of future drivers through the earliest hoops and puts them in a position where it's easy to incentivize them to start driving. (Clever to the extent that that works.)
I can't see why you think there's a similarity, other than that you think they're both underhanded, and that they're both done by companies providing taxi-like services.
They have to ensure supply while they bring on new customers (has associated acquisition cost) if they acquire a customer and that customer isn't able to purchase anything from them due to lack of supply (or in the case of uber the price is too high because of surge kicking in) then that customer will churn forever, and potentially share their negative experience with their friends.
So basically, nail supply, grow customers, don't run out of cash before the whole thing is working.
If Uber's incentives for drivers result in a better experience for riders (shorter rides), isn't that a good thing?
Uber also offers bonuses if they complete a set amount of rides per day. There was a problem recently due to this when a driver fall asleep and the passenger had to drive the car. [0]
I have also experienced Uber drivers asking for a new ride to somewhere nearby using the Cash option after I completed a ride just so that they can increase the number of completed trips.
[0] http://thelogicalindian.com/story-feed/awareness/watchread-u...
Paying with cash has the same distribution of money (more or less), it's just handled differently.
I was in India recently. The driver said that when Uber started out, they'd give each driver Rs. 60K/mo (about $1000/mo) just to sign in for 10 hours/day, even if they did not give a single ride. Now, Uber pays by the number of rides and not a portion of the actual fares. So, for example, he said that Uber pays them Rs. 3500 for 17 rides. Most of my rides were about Rs 100 each; so Uber was taking a loss on each ride. But their system of paying by the ride is a genius idea: it removes the incentive for the driver to dick around and do a TSP around the city to drive up the fare. Now its in their interest to get the ride over with as quickly as possible, so they take the most direct route.
Edit: Sorry, "Rs" is the Indian currency, Rupee. There's about 65 Rupees to the USD.