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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn’t this technically qualify as discrimination? I vaguely remember reading about how one of the big dating apps increased prices with a user’s age, but had to revert the policy because it amounted to age discrimination. I would hope income qualifies for the same protection, but maybe not.
It does not. Edit: Answering the very last part of the comment; it does not have the same protections.
> more precisely predict what riders might be willing to pay for a ride It's weird to me that this sort of price discrimination is legal. E.g. given this information, my incentive as a rider is to never tip (so that their algorithm doesn't identify me as "willing to pay" more). Maybe I could also make a new Lyft account every time I need a ride?
> > more precisely predict what riders might be willing to pay for a ride > It's weird to me that this sort of price discrimination is legal. I don't interpret this as charging different customers different prices per se. But there are different prevailing conditions with different pricing justified (other than simple congested/not congested). Knowing what your service is worth to customers so you can extract a great…
Based on my experience Lyft and Uber charge different prices to different customers with identical trips. I've tested this by asking friends with who I'm about to share a ride with to request the same trip as me, and compare prices. We've observed differences of 10-20%.
> Knowing what your service is worth to customers so you can extract a greater fraction of this is pricing 101.
Where this becomes problematic is in the age of big data. When a company can build an accurate profile of me, they can extract maximum prices from me. We need laws that mandate what definition of "profile" is allowed to be used for pricing.
I'm not sure why we accept price discrimination at the individual level for airlines and Lyft/Uber. I'm pretty sure people would be outraged if Amazon started price discriminating based on your purchase history.
The article was written back in August, so are we already seeing the higher prices?
I feel like I've seen pretty high prices in Boston lately. On the other hand I took a trip to Las Vegas and suddenly Lyft was dirt cheap again.
> ...the company’s upcoming pricing algorithms, which they hinted might be able to more precisely predict what riders might be willing to pay for a ride. I hate the whole idea of this. If they track you around, maybe realize you order from fancy places on uber eats, then they will raise prices on something that costs them the same. There's something that strikes me as especially awful about automating the "how much i…
Couldn’t this technically qualify as discrimination? I vaguely remember reading about how one of the big dating apps increased prices with a user’s age, but had to revert the policy because it amounted to age discrimination. I would hope income qualifies for the same protection, but maybe not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been on a SharkTank binge just for fun, and one thing I notice is, every time a Silicon Valley company goes to pitch, the idea has some pretty bad problems: 1. The margin is high but the idea is easily copied 2. A ton of money has already been invested, and still not making money 3. Other things I can't remember at this moment I think SV has some sort of problem when it comes to starting businesses. Rarely somet…
You shouldn’t be using SharkTank to form your view on Silicon Valley... Some of the worst companies get on there, SV or not. Think about it, why would a good company need to go on Shark Tank? They can raise from much better investors if it was a good company.
Yes I completely agree with everything you're saying. ST definitely attracts certain kinds of companies with monetary needs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does not. Edit: Answering the very last part of the comment; it does not have the same protections.
Why not? Care to elaborate?
> ...the company’s upcoming pricing algorithms, which they hinted might be able to more precisely predict what riders might be willing to pay for a ride. I hate the whole idea of this. If they track you around, maybe realize you order from fancy places on uber eats, then they will raise prices on something that costs them the same. There's something that strikes me as especially awful about automating the "how much i…
I share the intuition that price discrimination feels wrong, but I have trouble really articulating why. Why is "the seller would have given it to me for less" any better than "the buyer would have given me more for it"?
Insofar as what they burn on being the peeps that figure out self driving cars... I mean that's looking to hit the sweepstakes. Chances are They won't be the ones to cash in that particular ticket.
> ...the company’s upcoming pricing algorithms, which they hinted might be able to more precisely predict what riders might be willing to pay for a ride. I hate the whole idea of this. If they track you around, maybe realize you order from fancy places on uber eats, then they will raise prices on something that costs them the same. There's something that strikes me as especially awful about automating the "how much i…
I understand all these specific scenarios may be kinda-dismissed with some commonsensical argumentation, but has someone somewhere (in the academia?) explored how perfect information could break the economy/capitalism in some way? It looks like an interesting problem theoretically. (I don't feel like arguing either way, just would like a deeper look on this.) It's my understanding that economists actually think that perfect information should be a prerequisite/an effect of efficient markets, but did they really mean the same thing when this was formulated in the last century?
[0] this tree may make this impression https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21778890