Hacker News Reader

Comment by xux | Hacker News Reader

>Most drivers were driving for both Lyft and Uber, and everyone was really just hanging on and waiting for the moment when Uber will inevitably emerge victorious, purchases Lyft, and raises their rates back up to more reasonable levels.

This is why one of Lyft / Uber should die already and let the other take over the industry. Ride sharing is such an amazing idea, but the competition is nasty. This is a perfect example of why a monopoly is infinitely better than having competition: http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-fo...

View on HN

> This is a perfect example of why a monopoly is infinitely better than having competition

This is a grossly over simplified assumption that does not stand on its own. The type of monopoly that Google has was not handed to it, but resulted from "nasty" competition. Google (currently) is literally too competent to beat in the search engine space. Perhaps Lyft will die off or by purchased by Uber, but it's not a given that it should, or even that it will.

More importantly, what happens when there is no competition between companies for drivers? Are we assuming that once (Uber|Lyft) has the market wrapped up they're going to benevolently maintain favorable driver pay rates? Are we really assuming that in the absence of incentives to do so that (Uber|Lyft) will favor drivers or riders instead of its own bottom line? Since this flies in the face of common sense and a mountain of empirical evidence to the contrary, why in this case is a monopoly preferred to competition?

Every monopoly in history got there by cutthroat competition, because guess what... competitions are cutthroat by nature.

So the answer isn't to prolong or encourage more competition, but to expedite the process going from competition to monopoly. There's no difference between a Lyft or Uber monopoly, but there's a huge difference between one of them winning, and both of them surviving.

No consumer wants to use two apps. No driver wants more pay cuts. Just like no advertiser wants to run campaign on two different search engines.

Hence why I said, one of them should win already.

So long as it's legal to operate in this way, if Uber + Lyft do combine and raise rates, what's to stop a new company from coming in and undercutting them on price? I think that, barring any laws preventing companies from using this business model, we're now in a race to the bottom on price, which seems to be what the medallion system was all about preventing.

Uber and Lyft are just market makers, they only have so much power to "set" the price.

True. Now the question is how much is "so much"? Answer: if you have a near-monopoly as the middle-man between people in a market, you have almost all the power. In this case, "so much" is "SOOOO much".

>This is a perfect example of why a monopoly is infinitely better than having competition: http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-fo....

Or you could let the free market allocate resources quasi-perfectly, let the prices fall and send the money you saved on that ride to an African kid who just lost his family to Ebola. I don't know how much an Uber driver should make, and neither do you, nor the government.

how much one "should" make is a moral judgment tempered by the range of realistic possibility, not something someone knows or not. There is ZERO moral basis for saying that whatever a market works out equals how things "should" be.

I think we should have a world in which all our cooperative efforts in markets and otherwise that lead to general wealth and resources, we then distribute them so that as many people as possible can live a healthy, secure, and dignified life.

you must be 12

Reply on news.ycombinator.com