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0 pointsjagrsw8mo ago0 comments

> but here prices jump heavily during surge

Yup. The price jump isn't just a "surge." It's the algorithm calculating the highest price you'll tolerate without abandoning the app long-term, no matter availability of cars (which can be related, but from CFOs perspective that's not the metric to optimize)

This personalized price discrimination is precisely the kind of manipulation geohot is describing.

It's the same principle as (an old story) booking.com charging Mac/Safari/iphone users more.

0 comments

SXX8mo ago

Booking is the worst of them. You can open two tabs of one account next to each other and since one is from Google Maps pricing gonna be. 20% different.

Also all kind of cashback or discount offers just bake even higher premium than Cashback they offer.

So yeah booking hotels is more and more like a whack-a-mole game if you don't want to pay 30% more.

diggan8mo ago

It used to be that you could use Booking and get a cheaper reservation than using the hotels own website. Today, it seems to be the opposite, the prices for hotels are almost always cheaper on their website than Booking...

dalyons8mo ago

This is a common online trope, but has almost never been true for me when I’ve checked. (US domestic ~4 star hotels) Direct is more or at least equal to the aggregator prices.

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chii8mo ago

and you reinforce it every time you accept the price.

So you have to vote with your wallet. If you can't, or won't, then it just proves that their pricing algorithm has found "your" price, and so you don't get to keep your surplus value as it gets transfered to uber.

This is why i, even if i can afford it, go for lowest price, most economically valuable buys. Always, without exception. Cannot allow them to win.

matthewdgreen8mo ago

And this generally fails because Uber has more market power, given that there are only a few alternative options and many people will defect in order to get where they’re going. If customers could organize somehow and apply this principle collectively they could achieve some parity with Uber and it would affect that organization’s behavior more. But we’ve decided that regulation is bad, and the tech world hasn’t figured out how to build an Uber-bargaining collective app (which wouldn’t instantly itself defect and take a payoff from Uber.)

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