Pricing algorithms should be not be private. Free markets depend on transparent pricing.
Unfalsifiable means it's impossible to submit evidence to contrary. In this casem 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.
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.
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"?
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 stole tips and got away with it. The precedent has been set. The "hammer" you're talking about hasn't existed for over a decade.
People would forget a week later and continue to use the app. I think that saying is a bit naive to the post antitrust capitalist world
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.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/uber-and-execs-f...
[2] https://www.hotrec.eu/en/policies/_airbnb_fined_on_the_balea...
I don't know whether they are charging more when users have credits in there account. It seems plausible I guess.
Here are some plausible reasons why it may not be the case:
- If Uber's analysis determined that the best price to charge to maximize profit is independent of whether or not the user has credits
- Because predatory practices would generate bad press and push users to competitors, which would reduce profits
> 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.
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.
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.
(Or has food stamps.)
Also, the coupons they print on the fly with the receipt could be custom priced for that specific customer, as well.
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.
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.
Your supermarket doesn't play that game.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We wish you a nice day.
- 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
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.
(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!
How in the world is this unfalsifiable? Can't you just have two Uber accounts and cross check their prices?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
How is this different from what I am saying?
This post sounded like it's saying that the later search is the one with the lower 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.
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!
That article certainly doesn’t prove that was an urban legend. Uber built an entire system to serve fake data to government officials
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-f2971465-73d2-4932-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...
They were almost kicked out of the App Store for building a system to deceive Apple’s employees, too:
https://financialpost.com/technology/personal-tech/uber-was-...
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.
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.
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?)
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.
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/tlc/downloads/pdf/trip_record_use...
[2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/tlc/about/tlc-trip-record-data.page
[3] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/tlc/downloads/pdf/data_dictionary...
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...