Drivers dont want to drive for under a certain value, so they simply inform the app who adjusts the value to fulfill demand. Seems like its what you want to happen.
It’s a great illustration of how supply and demand work to determine prices.
Someone has to check it to make sure it is working.
If so then yeah, but I'm not sure they're always 1:1.
That's much easier to organize at an airport than elsewhere, since all the drivers are required to gather together in an airport waiting area.
The workers are "defrauding" Capital out of greater-than-substance wages. It's bullshit, and they'll try to re-frame in in terms of customers, but that's essentially their view.
Lyft and Uber have a vested interest in making their objection seem "pro-consumer," when they're primarily anti-worker; lower prices to the consumer pumps up the demand curve and Lyft makes more money.
Given that Lyft and Uber are losing money, there is no difference between the two. Uber and Lyft are just vehicles (hah) for consumers to make taxi drivers work for less than what taxi drivers used to make. People use Lyft and Uber because it’s cheaper than taxis. Since Uber and Lyft don’t make any money, those savings are coming out of the pockets of drivers.
(edited s/elastic/inelastic - I dun goofed. Thanks, Erik!)
Great point - they could be loosing a lot of passengers to taxis
That passengers suffer from a price surge does not assume an inelastic demand, or even a downward-sloping one. If you pay a higher price, you're suffering more, even if somehow it leads you to buy more of that thing.
By "suffering" I just meant "paying (someone, maybe another ride service) for it".
If higher prices depress volume, then some of the very drivers temporarily striking to raise the price end up paying for it, by ending up without a client. If all the drivers gain from it, then the airport demand for their Lyft services in particular (as opposed to demand for other ride companies) would in fact appear to be pretty inelastic. (Both seem plausible to me.)
10 rides at 10 bucks or 5 rides at 20 is the same for uber, but way better for the driver (and worse for the consumer).
Edit:
Fraudulent: "intended to deceive someone in order to get money or property".
The collusion is intended to deceive Lyft (and in the end customers) for financial gains.
If Lyft and Uber allowed direct pricing, this wouldn't happen. Drivers would set the price they're willing to work for. Instead, drivers--who, once more for emphasis, are supposed to use price fluctuations as incentive or disincentive for working, that's what "surge pricing" was in the first place--only have one message that they can send: "nope, not at that price".
Or they can be obligated to work cheap because rich people demand their labor.
Hrm. I think I now understand where the claim of "fraud" comes from.
They agreed to drive for a service for x. They can’t then complain that they are making x or manipulate the system to earn more than x.
They're refusing to entertain offers below a certain rate. That drops supply, which requires price increases to satisfy demand on the other side. The market, literally, is working as intended.
Grouping together to drop off and artificially increase prices when a flight lands sounds great because these are “the little guys”. If Google were doing it you would lose your shit.
Google doing it would be different, certainly. Companies are less important than people and poor people trying to survive get significantly more leash than multi-billion-dollar companies. If ride-on-demand companies operated with a transparent bid-ask system (see something like Taskrabbit for an example) instead of the opaque and intermediated market that they do, I don't think we'd be having this discussion. But they want to set prices and they want labor to shut up and take it, and that's not acceptable. To that end, yes, this is a fundamentally different thing than a multi-billion-dollar company controlling a market.
To me this does not seem different from taking a longer route to increase the fare.
What you describe would probably be fine if that wasn't concerted. But here they all collude to artificially trigger surge pricing.
Edit: Whether this is a "regulated market" is a red herring and irrelevant.
Why is this driver behavior fraud--and not the collective behavior of these ride-on-demand companies in general?
Hell, let's go back to first principles: why is choosing to refuse to take rides below a certain price ever "fraudulent"? It might be "bad", it might even violate the terms of a contract with Lyft/Uber and thus be grounds for termination of the relationship between the driver and the ride-on-demand company, but how is it "fraudulent"?
Words mean things.