Kicking people off for accepting rides and then canceling them makes perfect sense because once you accept the ride, the customer is waiting and they're not looking for another driver. It also discourages drivers from looking at the destination and then refusing rides that legally they're not supposed to, like trips into black neighborhoods.
Accepting in the first place either happens or doesn't in only a few seconds, and if you don't they immediately go on to the next driver. At best they have the incentive to make you manually re-enable your availability to drive if you neither accept nor decline more than a couple of rides in a row, so they can stop routing rides to you if you're not actually there. In makes no sense to kick you off over it, so why would they do that?
The 'market price' changes as Uber decides it should. There is no actual market where agents can set their prices present.
Which is what allows agents to set their prices. If prices are too high, some riders exit or more drivers enter which causes prices to decline. If prices are too low, some drivers exit or more riders enter which causes prices to increase. Is this not the ordinary mechanism of market pricing?
"In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority and from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities."[1]
What you have then isn't a transaction between the driver and the rider, it's two transactions, one between the driver and Uber and another between Uber and the rider. Each transaction is negotiated. Uber changes their offers to each party based on supply and demand, and if either party doesn't like it they can hold out for a better offer or go use Lyft. And since Uber does actually adjust pricing based on supply and demand, the better offer actually comes when enough people hold out.
The way you negotiate with them is by delaying your purchase/sale until they meet your price. It's a functioning market.
That is price negotiation. The market price changes all the time in response to supply and demand. If you're not willing to do it for a lower price and someone else is, you lose business to them. An hour later there is more demand and you can get some business at your price. Or you can lower your price (accept both rides) and get business both times.
Narrowing the choice to "accept or reject" isn't really removing the price negotiation, it's just simplifying it down to what it inherently always was to begin with.
> Similar argument for changing toppings on a cake - a caterer can negotiate changes to the cake - an Uber driver has no such flexibility.
They get to choose what kind of car to drive, where to buy gas, what hours to work. What would you say is the equivalent thing they don't get to choose?
> Regardless, given corporate (human?) nature is to leverage any power differential to self-benefit, it seems reasonable that regulations be interpreted in the most protective (of the party with less power) manner possible.
But what does that even mean in this case? Isn't the party with less power the one that would be out of work if reclassified as an employee, because employees have less flexibility etc. than contractors?