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Comment by halviti | Hacker News Reader

>If Uber allowed drivers to set their own rates that would initiate a 'race to the bottom'

Not necessarily, it could easily go both ways as it would create a market for people that want to pay more for "better" drivers.. people with nice cars (teslas and generally expensive automobiles) just to be seen in them or to experience riding in them, drivers that pamper their clients with newspapers, in vehicle entertainment, free water, etc.

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You're right, it could go the other way. Note that Uber drivers protested the recent Uber price drop but Uber only drops the price to compete with other companies and does not care what happens to the drivers who are just a resource to them.

So individual drivers may well increase their rates if they're left free to do so.

But the biggest discriminator between getting a lot of fares and not getting fares will be price, not newspapers or free water and I suspect that the majority of the drivers would drop their prices in order to compete with other Uber drivers, rather than with other Taxi companies.

This then takes away control from Uber over their revenue stream and would quickly erode the market. In countries where I've been where cabs were completely de-regulated cab rides were ridiculously cheap because of this effect.

Right, but what would the UX look like for that? You're suddenly selecting multiple options, filtering based on your criteria, then having to reselect when there's not enough drivers that meet your criteria, etc. etc.

Part of the beauty of the uber experience is that (at least from a UX perspective), it's very very frictionless. You make two, maybe three selections and hit go, and you the car arrives.

Surely that is the point of the Uber exec etc categories?

Right, but there's three or four of those and you can only select one. The GP was describing filtering based on driver quality, on car style and model, etc.

That could easily balloon to a pretty large number of elements.

Not many people would regularly pay more for a more glamorous taxi ride. Most people I know see it as a commodity, "This driver hasn't died in a car accident, good enough for me".

Then you can set an option to always choose the cheapest available driver (I think it would also work as a reasonable default).

which makes it a race to the bottom again - reducing ubers profit

This is not so obvious to me. If rides are cheaper then perhaps more people are willing to use it.

Plus, there clearly is a point where drivers don't find it economical anymore. And it seems from the article, that so far it is Uber who's trying to make rides cheaper.

"Not necessarily, it could easily go both ways as it would create a market for people that want to pay more for "better" drivers.. people with nice cars (teslas and generally expensive automobiles) just to be seen in them or to experience riding in them, drivers that pamper their clients with newspapers, in vehicle entertainment, free water, etc. "

All great theories, but in practice, history has shown that the thing that drives most situations like this is price, not anything else.

Exactly, when I was living in Chicago, I had drivers who were literally worth 2-3x what I paid for my trip all because of driving nice CLEAN cars, treating me literally like royalty and many other things.

Taxi's I've taken didn't care about anything and I'd sometimes step in some fluid I'd assume was puke from a previous fare and they had no care outside of giving me dirty looks because I only gave a $2 tip on a $10 fare.

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