In the four years since the car service Uber launched, it has been beset by criticism from myriad groups, including city officials annoyed by its sometimes cavalier attitude toward regulation and taxi companies annoyed by increased competition. Some of the harshest criticism, though, has come from an unlikely place: Uber’s own customers. Thanks to its reliance on what it calls “surge pricing”— meaning that during times of high demand, Uber raises its prices, often sharply—the company has been accused of profiteering and exploiting its customers. When Uber jacked up prices during a snowstorm in New York last December, for instance, there was an eruption of complaints, the general mood being summed up by a tweet calling Uber “price-gouging assholes.”
What’s striking about the Uber backlash is that the company is hardly the first to use dynamic pricing. There have always been crude forms of price differentiation—or, as it is known in economics, price discrimination. If you go to a movie matinee, you pay less than if you go at night, and if you’re willing to wait to buy a new dress (and run the risk that it might sell out), you can often get it at a marked-down price. But dynamic pricing in a more rigorous sense was pioneered in the 1980s by Robert Crandall, CEO of American Airlines, as a way to fight off competition from discount airlines like People Express. American began by slashing prices for tickets bought well in advance, while keeping prices for tickets bought closer to takeoff (when ticket inventory was lower, and demand was less price-sensitive) as high as possible. In the decades since, this kind of yield management has become integral to the business models of airlines, hotels, and rental-car companies, and greater computing power and more sophisticated data analysis has turned pricing in these industries into an incredibly complex process. (Dynamic pricing has also allowed sites like Priceline and Hotwire to flourish, since when hotels are stuck with extra rooms, they’re often willing to drop prices rather than let a room sit empty.) More recently, as technology has made it easier to segment the market and change prices on the fly, dynamic pricing has become common in other industries, too. Many professional sports teams now use it to set ticket prices—games against high-profile teams cost more than games against cellar dwellers—while concert ticket prices wax and wane with demand.
If dynamic pricing is hardly unusual, why has Uber taken so much flak? Some of it is a matter of history: early on, Uber’s pricing was not especially transparent, so customers occasionally found themselves stuck with fares that were much higher than they expected. The fact that some of the most high-profile examples of surge pricing have been the result of big storms also matters, since it taps into people’s visceral dislike of price gouging. A 1986 study by Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler found that most people thought “raising prices in response to a shortage is unfair even when close substitutes are readily available”—a situation that almost perfectly describes Uber. Then, too, the price increases during surges are often magnitudes greater than customers are used to; during that New York snowstorm, Uber charged up to nearly eight times as much as it usually did. Thaler has suggested that people find price increases above three times normal psychologically intolerable.
It’s also important that Uber’s prices only rise above the base rate and never fall below it, since customers seem to accept dynamic pricing more easily when it’s characterized as a discount. At the movies, for instance, prime-time tickets aren’t presented as a few dollars more than the normal price—rather, matinees are presented as a few dollars less. When American introduced dynamic pricing, it framed the 21-day advance-purchase requirement as a chance to buy “super-saver” fares. And happy hours at bars are, similarly, framed as a markdown from the regular price. These framing devices don’t change the underlying economics or price structure, but they can have a big impact on customer reaction. In 1999, for instance, Douglas Ivester, then the CEO of Coca-Cola, suggested that smart vending machines would allow Cokes to be more expensive on hot days, when demand was presumably higher. There was an immediate, intense backlash, and the company quickly backed down, saying Ivester’s comments were purely hypothetical. Had Ivester instead suggested that Coca-Cola could use dynamic pricing to charge less on cold days (even if it had raised the base price of a can), response would probably have been very different. Uber’s competitor Lyft seems to have recognized the power of framing: it recently introduced what it calls happy-hour pricing, offering discounts during slow business hours.
Finally, Uber also faces a challenge simply because of the industry it’s in: a business in which fares have historically been regulated (for cabs) and fixed (if you take a car service to the airport in New York, for instance, you typically pay the same price whether you leave at 6 a.m. or 5 p.m.). Uber’s pricing scheme is more complicated and harder to grasp intuitively, so that even though Uber is transparent about surge pricing, some people inevitably find it vexing. Uber’s also combating the sense that transportation is, in some sense, a public utility, and that it’s offensive to charge people so much more than they’re used to paying. This is a mysterious complaint, since there are many alternatives to using Uber. But it’s a surprisingly common one.
It’s easy to see, then, why Uber has become a flash point for criticism. But there is a deep irony here: the company arguably offers the most economically sensible, and useful, example of dynamic pricing in today’s economy.
In most cases, after all, dynamic pricing is a way for companies to maximize profits by exploiting demand—charging higher prices to people who can and will pay more. As MIT professor Yossi Sheffi has put it, it’s the “science of squeezing every possible dollar from customers.”
That’s because most industries that use dynamic pricing have a limited inventory (an airline flight has a set number of seats, a hotel a set number of rooms) and are trying to make as much money from selling that inventory as possible. Uber’s case is different. While the company also wants to make as much money as possible, it uses surge pricing not only to exploit demand but to increase supply.
What are the positives and negatives on both sides of the issues present above? Provide perspectives from both a buyer and a seller POV.