3 ms·

It's much worse. Most Uber drivers I get also make trips on the two other available apps (one global, one local). By now driver apps are effectively price-taker

It's much worse. Most Uber drivers I get also make trips on the two other available apps (one global, one local). By now driver apps are effectively price-takers. Edit: not to mention that drivers in nicer cars often give you their card with their direct Whatsapp number so you can schedule whole-day services, guided tours for folks from abroad and so on.

linkregister 10y ago
That sounds like a good thing for all "users" of ride sharing apps. Drivers make sure they get rides --local companies probably pay a little better. And passengers win because they can hunt for the cheapest (e.g. most subsidized) rates.
- thanatropism 10y ago
  This is a lot like the story of the kid who gets a horse. The level of competition of driver apps right now is excellent for passenger-users, sure. But it makes Uber (and by extension all copycats) a much less solid proposition than it seemed to be a few years back. While it's fashionable to shit on Uber right now, it was originally hailed as revolutionary for a reason: the "local" providers were entrenched monopolies who imposed artificial restrictions on supply to extract extraordinary rents. That's what we're going back to if the Uber business model proves to be unsustainable -- and there's rigorously no reason why "local companies" would do better, given high capital costs and a poor entrepreneurship environment nearly everywhere in the world. In a way this is a more general problem with the "disruption model": it identifies inefficient monopolies that extract too much rent and muscles in with crazy unicorn capital powers to establish business models that extract fewer rents, which in turn have to produce ROI -- at which point the business model is global rent-seeking arbitrage. And then the unicorn capitalists have to ask themselves if investing on Uber being in Brazil is a better use of their money than direct investing in assorted (large, profitable) business opportunities in Brazil. Uber-likes are not technological silver bullets. Just potato.

linkregister 10y ago

That sounds like a good thing for all "users" of ride sharing apps. Drivers make sure they get rides --local companies probably pay a little better. And passengers win because they can hunt for the cheapest (e.g. most subsidized) rates.

thanatropism 10y ago
This is a lot like the story of the kid who gets a horse. The level of competition of driver apps right now is excellent for passenger-users, sure. But it makes Uber (and by extension all copycats) a much less solid proposition than it seemed to be a few years back. While it's fashionable to shit on Uber right now, it was originally hailed as revolutionary for a reason: the "local" providers were entrenched monopolies who imposed artificial restrictions on supply to extract extraordinary rents. That's what we're going back to if the Uber business model proves to be unsustainable -- and there's rigorously no reason why "local companies" would do better, given high capital costs and a poor entrepreneurship environment nearly everywhere in the world. In a way this is a more general problem with the "disruption model": it identifies inefficient monopolies that extract too much rent and muscles in with crazy unicorn capital powers to establish business models that extract fewer rents, which in turn have to produce ROI -- at which point the business model is global rent-seeking arbitrage. And then the unicorn capitalists have to ask themselves if investing on Uber being in Brazil is a better use of their money than direct investing in assorted (large, profitable) business opportunities in Brazil. Uber-likes are not technological silver bullets. Just potato.