Well done Uber.

Therefore traditional push notification to get behind the wheel and start driving wouldn't work if the driver already made plans to celebrate New Year's with the family (and perhaps consume alcohol).

I've encountered a number of situations where Uber's surge prices annoyed people not simply by how expensive it was, but because the person standing next to them got 2.5x and if they had waited another 10 minutes they might get 1.25x or 8x. The non-repeatability can be frustrating and feel unfair.

However, just because NYE 2014 naturally surged to 4.5x doesn't mean that NYE 2015 will, because things change. Not the least of which is the (small, but vocal) backlash against Uber that this article is a part of.

But that was in previous years, right? A lot of things have happened in the last 12 months to change this NYE's outcome: more competition, more of their own cars on the street, a year of bad publicity against Uber, and then telling everyone that there will be surge pricing in effect (instead of letting it happen algorithmically)?

How is anyone surprised by the outcome?

Right now I don't think Uber does a good job at, for want of a less fluffy term, "feeling sentiment". They're extremely good at parsing past data and extracting conclusions, but that's about it.

Well actually they don't because they overrode the algorithm instead of letting it do its job.

The culture at Uber is actually "greed".

To me it's a little deceiving, because Uber frames it like this grand algorithm determining the pricing, when in reality I feel there's a substantial human element in it.

My theory is that they may have goosed the algorithm based on prior years, or perhaps their algorithm considers historical data for all (or just important) dates. Creating an algorithm that correctly models demand / pricing for all regions is pretty tough, and there are always going to be situations where what seemed reasonable gives you incorrect results.

The market would operate much more efficiently as a double auction: potential passengers submit their bids and drivers simultaneously submit their ask prices, and Uber continuously chooses some price that clears the market.

But the drivers love it and I doubt it's going away. 10 kuai is less than 2 bucks and they don't make enough money anyways.

Note that tipping is not a part of Chinese culture, you aren't usually expected to tip. This is more like an incentive for them to come pick you up. I was already tipping 10 kuai anyways before I started using the app, it just felt like the right thing to do.