Hacker News Reader

As I understand it, Uber's prices are listed prior to contracting for a ride. Uber's market is clearly the middle to upper income brackets. If it's understood that the price is time and conditions-variant, I fail to see how their pricing method is unethical.

View on HN

It's not unethical at all, it's just that mid-to-upper-class smartphone users in big cities have a wicked sense of entitlement.

They approve a dialog that warns them of 7x pricing (not with a button, mind you - but by explicitly thumb-typing the string "7X" into a box!) and then they complain on twitter when their ride is $300 and call Uber crooks.

The amount of entitlement found among the smartphone generation is staggering.

They might benefit from being a bit more transparent with pricing. From a customer's point of view, the multiplier is just arbitrary ("it's busy, so we're charging seven times what we normally do"), and they have to trust Uber that it is being set fairly. If it gets excessively high, like it has in these recent cases, they start losing that trust in Uber, and move to a competitor.

I agree, that the firm might benefit from transparency; but the article stresses the need for regulation in the interest of the consumer, not the firm.

This is how the price mechanism is supposed to work: it communicates inefficiencies over the long term.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com