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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Yes I live in the Bay Area. Last time I took a $9 Uber ride, I checked Lyft and it was $21. This has happened enough times that I check Lyft prices increasingly less frequently.

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In San Francisco Lyft is cheaper.

SF center to SFO is like $15-35 for Lyft Line while Uber charges $19-45.

SoMa to Marina is $4.05 for Lyft today and > $5.50 for Uber

Really? I regularly get $30-40 from downtown SF to mid-peninsula. Sometimes even less. To SFO much less than that.

http://static.dheera.net/share/20170915/uber.png

Both these companies have sophisticated price discrimination systems; two people catching the same ride at the same time will pay different prices, as I found out recently with a friend who gets much lower prices on Uber than I do.

Interesting - I gander it's at least somewhat related to how often you use the platform. People who rarely ride probably get lower prices in an attempt to capture them as riders.

My hypothesis is that they try to figure out what prices to set to extract maximum profit, based on how much they think you're willing to pay, how busy the drivers are, how much profit they're currently making in that geographic area, etc.

It's much easier to entice new riders by giving them coupons than it is to generally lower their fares.

Uber pricing varies quite a bit. I use uberpool frequently and have noticed a 40 percent change in price by changing my destination by a block or two. Which for the ride I am requesting is a very minor change.

Increasingly less frequently.

I fully extremely appreciate how I like the redundentcy of the repetitive redundance.

It's not redundant.

frequently: frequency is high

less frequently: frequency is low

increasingly frequently: dfrequency/dt > 0

increasingly less frequently: dfrequency/dt < 0

Sure, but it's generally just "less" or "less and less."

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