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Comment by thenmar | Hacker News Reader

I asked an Uber driver about surge pricing once, and he said that he doesn't see what the surge rate is. He just gets texts from Uber sometimes saying, "demand is off the charts! get out there!" So it's interesting to hear all the almost-dogmatic free market rhetoric from the company, when it seems the reality is that the market isn't very free at all.

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How? "Demand is off the charts! Get out there! Increase supply!" This is free market basics.

Free market basics would be "this it the current price for your services, would like you like to provide supply at this price?". This is more like your boss telling you to get back to work because it's busy.

Is it? thenmar was not clear whether the text was advisory or an order.

Though either way, I'm not sure what bearing that would have on how "free" the market is. Employers in some sense exist to entice you to do things you don't fundamentally "want" to do, by compensating you for it.

The text isn't an order. A couple of my friends drive Uber in their spare time for cash, and they can work when ever they'd like. They just sign in to the app on their phone and they become available, and can sign out when they don't feel like working anymore.

They get texts when surge pricing is in effect like above to incentivize them to sign in and drive.

The point wasn't about whether it's advisory or an order, the point was that the actual price was not part of the message. Given that market principles are supposedly about using price signals, this is rather at odds with market principles, don't you think? ;-)

I'm unclear on how the operators are going out there without information on what to charge. It seems like we're making up "facts" here, then drawing convenient conclusions.

Users connect their card to the Uber app. Drivers simply press "start trip" and "end trip" (on their own device, after having accepted the call and arriving at the pickup location) - all the billing is done by Uber. The driver isn't paid directly.

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