I think you are right. But that does not mean that this isn't in Uber's interest. Normally, it's not in any business's interest to lower prices to the point where you don't have enough capacity. That would be leaving money by the curbside that you can readily grab, and it would not even be particularly useful for your customers, because your product still needs to be allocated and customers end up spending time and effort to get their slice if they cannot simply buy it. But that reasoning assumes that everybody who might like your product already knows about it. And that simply isn't true for Uber, which is why they need all the marketing they can get; and what better marketing than this. The fact that they are rubbing up against a popular-in-SF (if batty) trade unionist ideology only makes it better, because that will mean more newspaper coverage.