Hacker News Reader

Comment by admax88q | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see Uber or a competitor embrace the "independent contractors" idea and let drivers and riders bid for service.

I think it's possible to implement this in a user friendly fashion. Enter your destination and your max spend, maybe minimum driver rating, drivers bid for the fare. Let "surge pricing" and basic fares actually be determined by market forces rather than Ubers algorithm.

View on HN

I believe "Sidecar" did this. They ultimately failed and I would imagine the user experience of having to choose and filter prices from a list for a something relatively time sensitive (a ride) to have contributed.

Ultimately it'd just boil down to a button that finds the lowest price at the highest rating (of the driver) and the closest distance to me, which is what you get with the current services.

How does bidding matter at all as far as the employee/employer relationship in this context? It'd make more sense to argue that reinvesting in things like self-driving cars is what breaks the dynamic because the "platform" is withholding revenue from drivers to expand in a way completely unrelated to their work.

When their work and pay are dictated by the platform, they are not independent of it, and are de facto employees.

Making the work they do and their pay something they decide and just obtain via the platform (just facilitated by it) then they’re actually independent of it.

Except that their work isn't dependent on the platform, they can swap nearly instantly between Uber and any other available gig platform since the requirement for all of them is simply to have a car. Pay is the same basic story, when one delivery platform isn't paying enough the attentive drivers simply hop to another platform.

I don't think this works for two reasons. First you're incentivizing the wrong behavior, which would be to complete the ride as fast as possible rather than completing it safely. The second is that it breaks down in small economies where people can easily price fix.

Aren't Uber/Lyft/food delivery gig-economy folks already encouraged to complete the ride (or delivery) as fast as possible?

I agree smaller economies could be a problem, but I'm not sure there's a better solution. A small economy is unlikely to have taxi services at all. Small economies are usually geographically smaller meaning taxis will have to compete against just walking or biking.

Adding driver reviews to your bid helps discourage unsafe driving. All transportations services (except public transit) are encouraged to complete rides as fast as possible to then get the next ride.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com