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San Diego's Bird Scooter Hoarding Problem
- rcthompson 8y agoThis reminds me of the anecdote where some city tried to deal with their rat problem by offering a reward for every dead rat turned in. Instead, people started breeding rats so they could have more to turn in for reward money, and the rat population actually increased. Or something like that. I might be mis-remembering some details.
- ThePadawan 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
- rcthompson 8y agoYep, that's the example I was thinking of!
- groestl 8y agoA nice, classic variation of this theme, featuring day-care centers: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomi...
- ec109685 8y agoNot sure if it's analogous. The day care scenario replaced the guilt of leaving your child at day care too long with a fine that removed that guilt. Clearly, you can fix the daycare scenario by 1) communicating to the parents picking up their children late the pain that causes the workers; 2) Ratcheting up the fine so that it is clearly painful to parents; 3) Ban parents who still flaunt the system.
- kenhwang 8y agoMy dog's daycare has this system! $35 for a full day of daycare (7am - 9pm). $15 for late pickup (9pm - 11pm).
- yason 8y agowith a fine that removed that guilt Rather tha guilt I think the factor in play can be described as cheap overtime daycare. It's actually more valuable to pay $3 and get more flexibility in your day rather save $3 and be on time. Need to see the dentist after work but you'd have to first pick your kid and have him sit in the waiting room while you're in? No problem, pay $3, let him play at the daycare and go to see your dentist first, then pick him up.
- suls 8y agoIsn’t this just a mispriced externality? I.e. if the late pickup fee was actually charged at market rates it would be what, $500? (random guess obviously)
- owenmarshall 8y agoMy child’s daycare prices late pickup at $20 for pickup after time and an additional $10 a minute for minutes 5-10. I don’t believe they often use this - maybe only against chronically late parents - but it is in the contract.
- kaybe 8y agoMhm, isn't that one of the recommendations for freelancing when you get an offer that you don't really want to do and you don't want to say 'no' to their face? Give them a price quote so ludicrously high they either walk away balking or take you up on it, which means that while you're doing the job you didn't want you also get a ton of money and some data on how much your services are valued. In this case, apply to the daycarer actually staying late.
- elastic_throe 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
- User23 8y agoThis happened in Seattle but with human corpses, back in the early days. It worked out exactly how you’d expect.
- cyphar 8y agoThere is actually a term for this in economics. It's called the "Lucas critique", and effectively states that any metric will be gamed eventually. It's slightly more subtle and is actually a critique about macroeconomic policymaking -- that people's actions are not structural and that making a new policy will affect how people act as they try to (ab)use the new policy -- but that's the basic gist. EDIT: To clarify -- I'm not an economist, it's just something I read about in my spare time. I'm sure that the Lucas critique was pre-dated by other ideas (it's far too obvious to be entirely novel), and that there's a much deeper analysis that I wasn't aware of.
- elvinyung 8y agoLucas critique is predated by Campbell's law and Goodhart's law.
- lordnacho 8y agoIMO the deeper history in Lucas Critique is the Problem of Induction. "XYZ has always worked in the past" doesn't work. Imagine doing machine learning on this problem that Bird has. It could easily suggest that you should up the fees to get more scooter finders, rather than that you need to change the incentives.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thousandautumns 8y agoI believe this is related to another principle in Economics called Goodhart's Law, which essentially states that as soon as something becomes a metric for measuring performance, it ceases to be a valid measure of actual performance. Essentially using something as a performance metric creates the incentive to game the system, inflate their values, and generally divorce the metric from the phenomenon it's trying to measure.
- base698 8y agoThis was described in "The Wire" as juking the stats: https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM
- wickedwiesel 8y agoThere are several examples of cash rewards for rat hunting like in Jakarta [1], but the "classic" version of where this went wrong is the "The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre" of 1902 [2] where rat hunters would just chop off live rats' tails to score the reward instead of killing it, because it would diminish their future income. [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/nov/21/jakartas-rat-eradication-movement-public-offered-cash-reward-for-live-rats https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/nov/21/jakartas-rat-... [2] - https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-1902 https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
- ewams 8y agoCould you explain a little better on how this works?
- kristianov 8y agoBird Chargers are people who charge Bird e-scooter for rewards. They take Birds with low battery from the streets, charge them, and release them the next morning to collect their rewards. Each Bird has a different reward for charging. The company's reward algorithm seems to give higher reward for Birds that have been abandoned for a longer time. So the Bird chargers can just take Birds, "abandon" them in their backyard, wait until their rewards reach maximum, finally they will charge them and release them to get max rewards. Quite like farming, really.
- clort 8y agoIt rather seems to me that Bird would know where the scooter was being charged, and where it was accumulating value in a fixed location. They can correlate this information Bird really need to structure it better, and make it clear that such actions are fraudulent. The people involved need to lose their licence to charge and their user accounts and then they won't have any way to make money or use the scooters.
- icebraining 8y agoIt rather seems to me that Bird would know where the scooter was being charged, and where it was accumulating value in a fixed location. They can correlate this information Then people will use their grandma's backyard to "abandon" them and charge at their house.
- dgzl 8y agoBetter than Grandma, you start a black market scooter trading network with like-minded folks.
- 8y ago
- RangerScience 8y agoSeems like a way around this is to not pay for scooters that never moved. They're all GPS tracked anyway.
- gscott 8y agoMaybe after hitting $20 the price goes down for charging after that. Or never letting the charging fee get beyond $8........
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jaimehrubiks 8y agoThis is, indeed, a very hard problem to solve. The only option I see is banning somehow by law/agreement, and taking legal actions to people who 'steal' them. But in that case they would just stack them outside the house... You could ban people who charge bikes to use them (it is as weird as if an uber driver couldn't use uber as a passenger).
- ec109685 8y agoThese hoarders display obviously anomalous behavior. Overtime, Bird will be able to weed out this fraud.
- solatic 8y ago> a very hard problem to solve Is it? Honest chargers who go out to the boonies to recover truly hard-to-recover scooters will pick up scooters which turn red from all over the place. Dishonest chargers who kidnap scooters will have scooters who all turned red suspiciously in one place (the charger's home). Developing an algorithm to find the dishonest players should be relatively straightforward, and after dishonest players are found, they should be banned.
- Normal_gaussian 8y agoYes, this seems largely trivial for a moderate sized company. Will it be perfect? No. Will it be effective? Yes. Will it make a great HN blog post? Absolutely
- michaelt 8y agoDishonest chargers who kidnap scooters will have scooters who all turned red suspiciously in one place (the charger's home). ...until the dishonest chargers figure out they can easily block the GPS signal with a few cents of tinfoil when they grab the scooter off the street.
- SamReidHughes 8y agoYou can catch that too.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kenhwang 8y agoI think the incentive structure needs to change to discourage hoarding. Currently, the payout always increases as you hold onto a scooter. What I think solves the problem is: * An small bonus for nabbing the scooter while it still has a bit of charge left (<10%). Essentially a quick turnaround bonus. For the sake of argument, lets say $1 bonus + $4 base to match the original minimum if it's back on the street within 24h and never lost power. * $4 if the scooter lost power, but is still returned within 48h. * +$1 for every day it's missing after 48h up to $10 total. * -$1 for every person that visits it's last known location after 2h and reports that they couldn't find it, down to $2 minimum. This is to encourage users to quickly attach the nabbed bird to power and "claim" them as soon as they pick them up instead of throwing it into their garage for a week then claiming them. * The scooter gets set to $20 "lost scooter" bounty after a month, which can only be claimed once a month per user. If the chargers want to play games, make it a game.
- erentz 8y agoMake it simpler. First this is theft, they should assign some folks to track and report this to police. Let that be known and people might start being more honest. Second you could just add something to the terms and conditions which allows them to cancel people’s rewards in these obvious cases. “Oh you happened to have 20 scooters at your address for two days and then suddenly charged and returned them. We’re cancelling your account.” Assign someone again to find these obvious examples of people hoarding scooters then cancel their accounts or whatever is appropriate. As this poster shows, the man power involved shouldn’t be all that much. Browsing on a map. Etc.
- sushid 8y agoThat’s not a good way to change behavior. You’re essentially hoping that 1) law enformement agencies give a crap about this and 2) chargers learn that there are legal ramifications and change their behavior. Alternatively, as others have suggested, you can change the incentives to minimize hoarding. What do you think sounds more scalable/feasible?
- 8y ago
- alsothrownaway 8y ago> Company litters thousands of billboards all over streets and sidewalks, creating city-wide eyesore / road hazard > Citizens remove hazard from streets, profiting at company's expense Isn't this the definition of poetic justice?
- gtirloni 8y agoI understand these are faceless corporations but, if you're a concerned citizen and want to make a statement through civil disobedience, why not disable the scooters and leave a note? Why profit? I can't see this as poetic justice. Two wrongs don't make a right, as the saying goes.
- gtirloni 8y agoFor the downvotters, I'm not advocating you do any of that. I was writing from the point of view of someone who thinks what's being done is right (people screwing a company that is, in their views, harming their city) and how ripping it off by hiding the scooters and profiting from the charges is kind of messed up.
- lazerwalker 8y agoOnly if you only view the scooters as a "hazard" and an "eyesore". An alternate interpretation (even if you're rightfully skeptical of for-profit venture-funded startups like these) is that the scooters are a fairly sustainable and scalable form of individual transit compared to cars, and a world where scooters (or similar devices) fulfill a useful last-mile role in public transit is one that's beneficial for society and civic infrastructure.
- CaptainZapp 8y agois that the scooters are a fairly sustainable and scalable form of individual transit compared to cars, and a world where scooters (or similar devices) fulfill a useful last-mile role This argument only holds water if public transportation sucks in a city. If you can get to wherever you want to go within a 200 metre radius of a city by public transport (which is the case in a lot of European cities to begin with) then this argument does not make any sense. fulfill a useful last-mile role in public transit is one that's beneficial for society and civic infrastructure. That's at least debatable. If it's really part of public transport infrastructure then this should be coordinated with the cities. But the mindset seems more a : "We shit 500 of those things throughout a relatively small city and disrupt the holly bejeezus out of this town". As long as this attitude prevails I neither see this as a valid argument.
- JamesAdir 8y agoThe solution is super simple. Stop paying in direct payout and start paying in riding credits. I sometimes used Bird from the train station to my home in the evening. I would happily charge it in my home during the night and release it in the morning for Bird credits. But it seems that at this stage since the scooter companies raised so much money, they just have no problem to ignore it and pay directly or just throw more scooters into the pool.
- benj111 8y agoWouldn't you then get to a situation where x gets a bird, takes it home, charges it, uses it the next day, essentially creating a rental model where each scooter is used by one person a day? Presumably the nature of the beast is that these start off the day next to transport hubs and then spread out from there. It isn't then worth it for some one to go out of their way to take it back to that transport hub. If you are travelling against the prevailing traffic what you say would work, but not for the majority. As I understand it the bikes it London (and probably else where) vary the charges depending on where you're going. So if you're taking a bike back to where it needs to be, the charge is less. If you're taking it out to the edge of a zone where it will need to be collected by an employee, you pay more.
- davnicwil 8y agoCould this be solved by saying you stop getting credit after X days using the same scooter?
- sokoloff 8y agoSeems that just requires switching scooters every X-1 days. Ride up to one; stop your ride; start a new ride. Net cost $1 and you start a new cheap rental.
- davnicwil 8y agoWell, yes. And then you've increased the transaction costs of such a pattern of usage, thereby discouraging it, whilst also encouraging regular rotation of scooters throughout the customer base even when people stick with it. I think that probably goes some way towards solving the problem of 1-1 hoarding.
- codezero 8y agoIt sure if it’s related but I learned from my brother in law’s girlfriend that her little brother had been hoarding scooters because they had some app that could disable the tracking and let you ride for free. I guess the fact that these show up on a map contradicts that.
- usrusr 8y agoSo could it be an alternative client that uses straw-man accounts to cash in every time the hoarder charges a scooter, occasionally using some of the spoils to buy them a "free" ride? That would be fascinatingly twisted: make your accomplices think they are part in an entirely different kind of crime than they are. Even more twisted (but not as creative) if it's an inside job to get a larger slice of the VC pie.
- stevecalifornia 8y agoI feel like the obvious solution is to pay chargers based on how much of their charge was used the following day after releasing the scooter into the wild.
- noobiemcfoob 8y agoI don't agree that it's obvious, but I like the idea. Chargers would then be investing in the scooter's use the next day but with joules instead of cash. /joules will be the currency of the future!
- whoisjuan 8y agoThe scooter business it's proving to be a real life experiment of the many fucked up factors and forces that influence an urban modern society: vandalism, hoarding scooters for profit, tension between governments, companies and users, blatant violation of traffic rules, etc... As you scale something like this the problems become more evident and harder to manage. These businesses looked pretty solid when they had small fleets, but now that they are scaling it's pretty easy to see the cracks. Watching how this unfolds in the next two to three years is going to be a hell of a ride (no pun intended)
- koliber 8y agoI came to believe that these negative forces are all around us. They are constantly at play. As the landscape changes, they adapt to the new realities, but are mostly invisible. When a big company comes is with a sudden alteration to the "environment", these negative forces respond, with a force that is congruous to the speed at which the original change happened. If a change in society happens quickly, it is very visible. All the reactions also happen quickly and are also very visible. If the change happens slowly, the reactions also follow gradually and slowly, and everything seems less drastic and less noticeable.
- Tepix 8y agoIf you put hundreds of vehicles on the streets that cost $500 each you need to seriously think about people taking advantage of you, even if it amounts to stealing. You must not make it too easy and intriguing. "Gelegenheit macht Diebe" - "Opportunity makes the thief"
- sschueller 8y agoEspecially if your headquarters is across the ocean you just dumped theses things all over a foreign city with permission.
- chrisweekly 8y agowith -> without?
- koliber 8y agoOne possible solution is to look at the place where the scooter was charged. Next, look at the place it has spent waiting to be charged. If the distance is less than 100 feet, don't give a payout. This can also be gamed, but more elaborate rules can be implemented. Ultimately, it will not be worth a hassle to game the system on a wide scale. A sort of equilibrium will be achieved. Cat and mouse it is.
- IshKebab 8y agoI feel like a better and solution is to see if the scooter is actually used between charges. If it's in their garage obviously nobody can be renting it. They may perhaps try and get friends to rent it but if you do it as profit sharing rather than a fixed price then they can't cheat.
- koliber 8y agoI didn't realize that they are keeping them hostage for that long, through multiple recharge cycles. I thought that people are scooping up scooters, holding them in their garage until the price goes up, recharging them, and freeing them.
- IshKebab 8y agoAh maybe they are doing that too - good point. I suppose there is enough information gathered to easily detect those people, though I can't think of a good way to completely stop it (other than not increasing the price over time).
- chillacy 8y agoWhat if people were paid based on how many users your charged scooters had? That would incentivize you to also place the scooter in a prime location each day, optimizing for events, day of week, and competition
- xfitm3 8y agoI think this would negatively impact users in low traffic areas.
- Tiktaalik 8y agolmao. So many of these dumb problems would be solved if they worked with cities and created a docked system, but no I guess that's too boring and not ~disruptive~ enough.
- tapland 8y agoProblem with docked system is that it isn't nearly as handy. We got scooters in my town yesterday and there are multiple in each block already, whereas the bike docks the city has are spaced reasonably close (bus stop distance) but that prohibits people from going to get them since walking to the dock and back takes as much time as the bike commute.
- cycrutchfield 8y agoDocked systems have been tried and consumers do not prefer them.
- orbifold 8y agoIt works really well in Paris and where I live as well.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoWorks ok in New York. I would obviously prefer a dockless system, but I would also prefer free money, a jetpack and a machine that magically manifests sandwiches on demand.
- Tiktaalik 8y ago
- quickthrower2 8y ago> Over the next few weeks I drove more in gas then I would find scooters. So much for the environment eh!
- pxtail 8y agoVery simple solution: just set additional reward for rescuing poor birds, it will create new jobs, whole new caste will arise: bird hunters. They will just roam cities with smartphone in hand, rifle (for safety!), maybe loyal dog and set free flocks of birds.
- Waterluvian 8y agoWhy does the pay out have to increase? Have they tested what happens if it starts at $7 and never changes? I get the theory is to discover and incentivize less desirable scoot scoots, but I'm skeptical you actually need that.
- LowLevelHacker 8y agoA B testing is being done to death here. Scooters end up being "left for dead" if they are too far away and the battery is dead.
- pingmurder 8y agoSeems obvious the scooters need to be able to transit themselves to a charging station, like a rhoomba
- wffurr 8y agoThey should just switch to a docked model.
- AimForTheBushes 8y agoThe best part is being able to ride directly to your destination though.
- biophetik 8y agoI've witnessed plenty of people nabbing scooters in rental trucks or vans during the morning in San Diego. Probably 10-30 stacked all over. It occurred to me how scooters not only are a mode of transportation, but now a resource that people rely on for extra cash. Seems completely justified but oddly weird to me. I haven't witnessed it yet, but I wonder if there have been fights over territory/scooters.
- NorthOf33rd 8y agoThere have been many great pricing models posed in this thread to dis-incentivize gaming, but I'm a little surprised no one has mentioned the simple "make bird hunting a full time job with benefits." Just like uber before them, bird threatens to upend some reasonably decent jobs in cities with bike share programs- assuming the bike share programs don't learn from taxi drivers and adapt. So much of the reason these things work- and that the companies themselves become massively valuable is the externalization of costs. That doesn't have to be a given.
- dawnerd 8y agoI think Lime does that? In any case Bird should be inspecting their scooters frequently for safety reasons so really would just make sense to hire teams of people with vans or trucks to pick them up every night.
- midniteslayr 8y agoRazor scooters/eBikes do that in San Diego, and I know Jump bikes also have a team of people in San Francisco (as it was mandated by the city). In SD, the Razor Scooters are much nicer and doesn't seem to have as many problems with their equipment than the Bird scooters do.
- aezell 8y agoThank you for pointing this out. I'm always bemused at the overly complicated technical solutions proffered when a simple "pay a human a decent wage" solves the original problem and lots of other ones, too.
- andrewla 8y agoMaybe this is all common knowledge; I live in NYC so we don't have Birds yet, so I'm a little ignorant here. From what I can tell, each scooter that is low on batteries is given a bounty (somewhere between $5 to $20) based on how hard it is to find. I assume that the "hardness" is computed based on how many chargers fail to find the scooter, but there may be something more sophisticated at work. To charge a scooter, a charger finds one, checks it out in the charger app, and then takes it home and charges it, and returns it to its "Bird's Nest" (clever) in the morning, at which point you get paid. The scooters have GPS trackers to prevent theft. So what these hoarders are doing is stealing the scooters -- rather than checking them out through the charger app, they're just grabbing them and tossing them in their van, and then keeping them in their home, where other chargers will fail to find them, thus increasing their bounty, until they "discover" the scooters, claim them through the app, charge them, and return them to their nest. Have I understood this correctly? Given that they are removing the scooter without claiming it through the app (either as a rider or a charger) that means that they are stealing them, which means all Bird has to do is provide the police with the address of the hoarder and that's the end of it.
- cyphunk 8y agosome times I love america
- muthdra 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
- _rs 8y agoAnother thing I don't see anyone talking about is that some people (users) hoard scooters so they definitely have one available to ride the next morning without having to hunt for one (and hope they find one close enough). I've seen this where someone will ride a scooter somewhere and bring it inside behind a locked door so that it will be available in an hour or two when they are leaving. I would expect this same behavior to happen overnight when scooters have a high enough charge left on them to still be useful.
- dalbasal 8y agoYou might sum this up with "markets & incentives are hard"
- dchuk 8y agoI live in Pacific Beach in San Diego (to the left of that first map in the post). Every morning on my drive to work, I pass a few pickup trucks with 10/20/30+ scooters in the back. Seems like folks have created a full time business out of charging these things, so I'm not surprised it's challenging for a "casual" charger to make a couple bucks with them. That being said, I was very bearish on the idea of Birds until it clicked to me how brilliant the charging program is. They're essentially paying people to protect these things in their homes overnight, and nicely place them in optimized locations every morning. Other competitors down here (especially bikes) who just left their units out all day and night quickly lost them all to homeless people and vandals chucking them into the ocean. But Birds are cleanly lined up on every corner every morning. Very clever.
- warunsl 8y agoI was in SD this weekend. I did see the pickup trucks you mentioned at night picking up like 15-20 birds/limes. How silly of me. I thought these were the from Bird and Lime distributing the scooters evenly across the blocks!
- aezell 8y agoI rode my first Bird in Pacific Beach last week. They don't exist where I live. I just assumed that those trucks were contracted by the company somehow. I didn't know this whole charging economy existed. I also saw a few drunken (or angry) [or both] people smash up a few of them as they walked down the street. I'd like to know how many they lose in this way.
- PeanutNore 8y agoIt's practically an article of faith on here that these scooter companies are providing a valuable public service and deserve to succeed, but I have yet to see a single halfway decent argument for why that's the case. From where I'm sitting the whole thing seems like a bad joke. The people hoarding scooters are probably just waiting until the company inevitably folds, with the (likely correct) assumption that an already overstretched municipal police force isn't going to be bothered to help a (fiscally and ethically) bankrupt company track down hundreds or thousands of lost scooters across town. The correct response by cities to the issue of the startups dumping scooters on public sidewalks is to send them to the municipal recycling plant for scrapping.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ricardobeat 8y agoCheap, quick transport on an electric vehicle. More convenient and comfortable than public transport. What makes you not consider that valuable?
- g45y45 8y agoEventually every scooter will be stolen, GPS disabled and board replaced. They are commodity Xiaomi scooters, retailing for hundreds of dollars. They can be stolen and rebirthed for <$50. Scooter rental was a terrible idea, and the assets of the companies will be redistributed to masses.
- randyrand 8y agoThe same can be said for bikes and bike locks. I don’t think enough people steal for it to prevent all bicycling. Perhaps there is still benefit.
- goobynight 8y agoIt certainly prevents many people from leaving unattended bicycles out after dark or using them during this time. Not just after midnight or something. If you do anything except daytime ride, you're liable to get messed with in some cities. People largely just accept thieves in their society.
- millzlane 8y agoThat's exactly what they're doing. There is a dude on scooter talk who isn't shy about letting us know how he's exploiting the system. He intends to keep doing it until bird or lime shut him down.
- burlesona 8y agoA better incentive would be to give chargers a tiny cut of all the riding fees for the next charge. Make it so the scooter have to be below 50% battery OR not ridden for a day in order to be eligible to move. That would incentivize the chargers to get the scooters back on the street ASAP. If there’s still hoarding, offer riders (not chargers!) some bounty for reporting hoarding. As other posters have said it’s a game-design problem to align incentives so that you get the outcomes you want.
- kazinator 8y agoI don't see the problem. Since the scooters are up for grabs, you're allowed to take one and park it at home. Whether that looks like stealing or just making sure you have it available later when you need it is a gray area that requires interpretation on a case by case basis. That's probably why the police don't care. If the scooters are indoors, that is good for the scooters, by the way.
- mannykannot 8y agoI don't think it could be any more serious a matter than not abiding by the EULA.
- kazinator 8y agoBasically, the EULA should (and likely does) have some terms against that. That is to say, scooters that are fobbed out by their user should be left in such a way that their are accessible to other users. Identify the violators and charge them fines and/or terminate their accounts. Keeping scooters in homes and garages can be allowed, provided the scooters are "on the clock": in the middle of a booking that is being paid for.
- mkong1 8y agoWhat is the time scale for increasing the bounty vs how long it takes to charge a scooter? If we give the 'hoarders' the benefit of the doubt, could it be the bounty is increasing while they have a bunch of scooters queued up to charge? They grabbed 20 in their truck, and it takes 5 hours to charge 1, but they only have 2 outlets, but the bounty goes up every 12 hours, so they have a backlog?
- kenhwang 8y agoThey're supposed to scan the QR code the moment they grab them, which essentially marks the scooter as found and the rates are frozen. Then they can take their sweet time charging them. What they're doing instead is grabbing them without scanning them, chirping be dammed, and holding onto them for a while so the bounty increases. Then they scan them as found and charge them.
- sizzle 8y agoAnyone well versed in game theory know an optimal solution to hedge against the problem of hoarding?
- undersuit 8y agoThe hoarder finds some value in hoarding. In extreme cases of hoarding where you find the house is filled with items often the value comes from the hoarder not having to worry about inadequate supplies. A person who hoards food because of previous issues with having adequate food is sating their need for security. This isn't an extreme case but the same reasons still exist, hoarding the scooters is providing value. Take efforts to reduce value. Like start letting the scooters talk to each other and you'll be able to find the cycle in the graph where the hoarded scooters only talk to each other until one pays outs handsomely and it joins the rest of the public scooters. Or make a scooter pay out less if it has been idle for an extended period of time even with low battery value. Or the opposite, make a scooter pay out more if it's getting higher than average use.