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Uber and Lyft Suggest the Days of Cheap Rides Could Be Over

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Re: Uber and Lyft Suggest the Days of Cheap Rides Could Be Over

#221

Post by leetcrew »

esoterica wrote: post #171
blhack wrote: post #146

Here’s how I wish Uber pricing worked: When I hail a ride, I say: I’m going from A to B and am willing to pay C (which Uber can recommend to me) for it. Now if nobody responds, I increase C until they do. This way the drivers know where they are going, how much I’m paying, etc. When a driver “accepts” a ride, I see their vehicle and rating, and get to choose from the people who have accepted. And on the other end, th…

Drivers usually accept new rides while in the middle of driving though. Do you really want an army of distracted drivers on their phones participating in a complicated bidding process?

I definitely don't want to bid on each individual ride, but it would be cool to have a setting in the app that lets me choose between paying more for a shorter wait or waiting longer for a cheaper ride. the driver app could have a similar setting where they can adjust the tradeoff between higher fares and inconvenient endpoints.

Re: Uber and Lyft Suggest the Days of Cheap Rides Could Be Over

#222

Post by lotsofpulp »

bsder wrote: post #216
lotsofpulp wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People smart enough to price discriminate won’t give quotes that easily.

Then I don't do business with them. Seriously, auto dealers STILL try to do this and it pissed me off to no end the last time I had to buy a car. Except one company. I sent in what I wanted on email. They sent back the quotes on 3 cars in stock. The quotes were all reasonable and slightly below the average. I went in and bought the car. Since then, seven other people in my social circle bought from the same auto deal…

Auto dealers are selling a product that can easily be found exactly the same and compared elsewhere. For custom work such as construction, you’re not going to be able to do that.

Re: Uber and Lyft Suggest the Days of Cheap Rides Could Be Over

#223

Post by Daishiman »

ikeboy wrote: post #166
majormajor wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has a constant negative effect so you need a penalty that has a constant discouraging effect. A flat fee doesn't discourage those with more money to pay it. It simply says "speeding is OK if you have enough money."

A constant fine has a constant discouraging effect.

No it doesn't. A fine's discouraging effect is proportional to the person's ability to pay for it.

Re: Uber and Lyft Suggest the Days of Cheap Rides Could Be Over

#224

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

leetcrew wrote: post #215
Barrin92 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Pretty crazy with Juul, WeWork, DoorDash, and Uber / Lyft all struggling Given that the entire value-added of a company like Uber is getting a taxi to you slightly faster it's not surprising at all. Uber didn't make cars cheaper, drivers faster or added productivity in any other way plus they have a gigantic and expensive tech overhead, so it was never at all clear to me how they're supposed to be both competitive a…

the value add of uber is that you can use your phone's GPS and a map to tell someone where to pick you up instead of calling up the taxi company and describing where you are. I know taxi companies are starting to implement this stuff, but they didn't seem to be in a big hurry to do it before uber/lyft showed up. I haven't tried in a while, but I bet the smaller cab companies still don't have anything like this. even…

I tried to take a cab exactly once, in Los Angeles. I Google searched for a number. They asked me where I was, exact address. I didn't know the exact address. Even on Google maps it took a bit to figure out the exact address. After some back and forth, they inform me that they don't operate in that location and give me the number to another company. I call the other company. They tell me the cab will be there in 20 minutes, maybe. I said, "what do you mean maybe?" I was already cutting it pretty close on a flight.

Uber had just gotten into LA a couple of months back. I downloaded Uber and within a couple of minutes, I had a ride on the way, and I could see exactly where the driver was and how long it would take to get there. Hate the company, but the product definitely added value.

Re: Uber and Lyft Suggest the Days of Cheap Rides Could Be Over

#226

Post by ikeboy »

Daishiman wrote: post #223
ikeboy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A constant fine has a constant discouraging effect.

No it doesn't. A fine's discouraging effect is proportional to the person's ability to pay for it.

I ran through the model in other comments, so I won't repeat it here, but in general the disincentive is the same, but people's desire to do something that costs a certain amount goes up with their wealth (called an income effect in economics).

Re: Uber and Lyft Suggest the Days of Cheap Rides Could Be Over

#227

Post by leetcrew »

guptaneil wrote: post #217
leetcrew wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are less than three thousand billionaires in the whole world. they could all drive like it was a formula 1 grand prix 24/7 and it would create a barely measurable blip in traffic fatalities. somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of americans are driving without insurance. I'm a lot more worried about them than the one lambo I see every couple months.

There's only one driver with the HN username guptaneil in the whole world. I could drive like a maniac and I would barely create a measurable blip in traffic fatalities. Where do I sign up to be exempted from traffic fines, since my driving doesn't have any impact anyway?

sure, and if there were a bug in the ticket processing system that made it impossible to actually charge a fine to somebody named "guptaneil" specifically, I would say it's probably not worth the trouble of fixing.

Re: Uber and Lyft Suggest the Days of Cheap Rides Could Be Over

#228

Post by lelandbatey »

ikeboy wrote: post #177
john-radio wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Therefore, if the rate is higher for some people, it's either insufficiently disincentivizing poorer people from speeding, or excessively disincentivizing richer people. I don't understand how you reached this conclusion. > Speeding has a constant negative effect on society. It doesn't vary based on how wealthy the speeder is. The point of a speeding ticket isn't to make things right or to make amends for the bad e…

>I don't understand how you reached this conclusion. Set X= negative value to society of an action we want to discourage, and Y= probability of getting caught. If a fine is set at X/Y, then the expected cost of doing this action is X (fine times probability), and so it will be done if the value of doing it is above X and won't be done if the value is below X, which is efficient. Any value other than X/Y is inefficien…

The model you've presented doesn't account for a lot of other effects which we want as a collective want to account for. Let's break it down.

We can't assume perfect humans, so we must assume that sometimes, some of the people will act irrationally or make mistakes. Introducing this "error rate" into our actors means there's an un-removable noise floor of cases where we issue fines to our actors for breaking the law.

This noise-floor of mistakes leads to some very unfortunate side effects when we use constant fine pricing. Assuming an income distribution like what we have in reality, this means that a certain percentage of our population will have so little income that the fine will ruin their life, making them less effective and thus our population less effective. And there's no way we can remove this by adjusting the price of our constant fine. If we remove the fine, then everyone speeds. Even at the best sweet spot, we'll have a system where some people will always speed, and some people will never rationally choose to speed but will be economically "killed" by the fine anyway.

These two inefficiencies are what variable fine pricing are meant to address. By scaling price with actor income, we are able to maintain a similar relative (dis)incentive across income levels, and we remove the cases where we are sentencing a portion of the population to economic "death".

Re: Uber and Lyft Suggest the Days of Cheap Rides Could Be Over

#229

Post by ikeboy »

mpweiher wrote: post #218
ikeboy wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speeding has a constant negative effect on society. It doesn't vary based on how wealthy the speeder is. Therefore, if the rate is higher for some people, it's either insufficiently disincentivizing poorer people from speeding, or excessively disincentivizing richer people. Pigovian taxes should be constant. And if it's not pigovian, why give tickets at all?

> It doesn't vary based on how wealthy the speeder is...Pigovian taxes should be constant. Speeding is not a market activity and a speeding ticket is not a tax. Speeding is either a misdemeanour or crime, that means it is simply prohibited. Period. The state of affairs you refer to, where the speeding ticket is considered just a cost of doing said activity is exactly what we want to avoid, and income-based speeding t…

>Speeding is either a misdemeanour or crime, that means it is simply prohibited. Period.

Why not set the fine to a million dollars for everyone, then, or at least significantly boost the fine? Under my framework it's easy to answer, since it's inefficient to disincentivize speeding that much.

>The state of affairs you refer to, where the speeding ticket is considered just a cost of doing said activity is exactly what we want to avoid

Why?

>Punish

What is the benefit of punishment outside of deterrence? And for deterrence, the clear economic answer is to have the same amount of deterrence for everyone, which requires a constant fine.

Re: Uber and Lyft Suggest the Days of Cheap Rides Could Be Over

#230

Post by leetcrew »

input_sh wrote: post #209
leetcrew wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are less than three thousand billionaires in the whole world. they could all drive like it was a formula 1 grand prix 24/7 and it would create a barely measurable blip in traffic fatalities. somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of americans are driving without insurance. I'm a lot more worried about them than the one lambo I see every couple months.

Where did I claim you're more likely to get in a car accident with a billionaire? There should be a punishment for traffic violations big enough to discourage the offender from repeating it. Since a couple of thousands will not cause such an effect on an ultra rich person, the punishment should be calculated in such a way that it actually does. Calculating it based off of income achieves just that.

what I'm saying is that it just doesn't matter how billionaires drive (on the rare occasion they even drive their own vehicle). billionaires speeding does not meaningfully affect your safety on the road. hitting them with a huge fine just indulges your jealousy.
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