6 ms·

Serious question: once the taxi industry has died what makes you believe that Uber won't implement similar policies?

abakker 7y ago
Nothing. As the saying goes, “get while the getting is good”. If I don’t take the cheap fare today, it doesn’t buy me anything in the long run anyway. Present dollars saved are a certainty, and if history repeats, there is a reasonable likelihood of future disruption being my easy-our for an anticompetitive Uber.
- pessimizer 7y ago
  I don't know if it's a good strategy to wait as long as it took Uber to supplant taxis for something to supplant Uber. If it follows that pattern, you won't live to see it, so "easy-out" is probably not the greatest descriptor. That being said, your individual boycott will have a minuscule effect, and money in your pocket is good. I just can't imagine that capitalism is meant to work like this; paying people to use your product until all the competition is gone, then once you're a monopoly jacking prices up to infinity, ditching quality, and regulating or buying out any potential upstarts.
  - abakker 7y ago
    A cynical person might say that it is meant to work exactly like this. Killing off older companies seems likely to be a service to progress and the economy. (not to the employees, which is a reason why I'm not a genuine advocate of pure capitalism). nevertheless, There are organizational, bureaucratic, and process debts in addition to technical debt, and I think capitalism acknowledges that in the end, those debts never get paid. Borrow against the future and burn out bright and fast. The good news, is except for capital itself, borrowing technology/process/and bureaucracy against the future is borrowing from yourself, not creditors.
    - AmericanChopper 7y ago
      Every dollar of funding that Uber receives comes from an investor that believes there is a long term business model in Uber. Even the short horizon investors have to believe that, otherwise they would have nobody to sell their shares to in the short term. In terms of killing competition, price wars almost always benefit consumers. Prices go down during a price war, and if the industry is susceptible to them, then another one will occur after the war is over. Look at the airline industry, it’s full of price war cycles. A carrier will try compete on a route, drive prices down, and sometimes this will result in carriers leaving the competition, and prices going back up again afterwards. When that happens, some time will pass, and it will happen again. The worst outcome for consumers is that the market returns to a non-competitive state when the dust settles. In that case, consumers are just back where they started, after having temporarily enjoyed the benefits of the price war. If the market ends up in an unreasonably non-competitive state after the price war, then the victor has just set themselves up for anti-trust action. Every mainstream capitalist economist I’ve ever heard of has firmly believed that regulating competition is an essential part of a capitalist economy. So if you think that’s not happening, it would seem to be a failure of government more that a failure of capitalist economics.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
robryan 7y ago
I don’t think the barrier to entry in a single city market is particularly high. Short of exclusivity on self driving cars I think Uber is only ever one price rise away from losing dominance in a city.
yawz 7y ago
I can ask a similar question: What makes you think that Uber can destroy/prevent the system/model that disrupts another (future) unfair market that it benefitted from? I don't think that Uber is a good example in the original context.
- pessimizer 7y ago
  Because they can buy out the competition before you've even heard of them?
  - prepend 7y ago
    That didn’t work for taxis.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      It did for centuries.
anonuser123456 7y ago
Lyft?
jimbokun 7y ago
Then it's time to apply anti-trust law to Uber. (Assuming Lyft or other companies are no longer viable competitors.)
- ken 7y ago
  Why not try to apply that to taxis now? Alternatively: why would the government care that a new monopoly replaced what is essentially an old government-approved one?
  - dlgeek 7y ago
    Because they no longer get a massive cut?
dahfizz 7y ago
Uber doesn't have the government protections existing cabs do. If Uber starts mistreating their customers, the customers have plenty of other rideshare alternatives.
prepend 7y ago
I think it will be easier to identify pricing problems with Uber than the 50+ different taxi markets. Uber and Lyft can adjust prices quite easily, while taxi markets require local regulators to approve changes. There’s also an issue that theoretically Uber and Lyft compete, where in every city in the US, pretty much, taxis don’t compete on price once it is set for a market. Uber/Lyft might start having anti-consumer prices once they kill all the taxis, but I think they will be subject to closer scrutiny than trying to take on local taxis.

Nothing. As the saying goes, “get while the getting is good”. If I don’t take the cheap fare today, it doesn’t buy me anything in the long run anyway. Present dollars saved are a certainty, and if history repeats, there is a reasonable likelihood of future disruption being my easy-our for an anticompetitive Uber.

pessimizer 7y ago
I don't know if it's a good strategy to wait as long as it took Uber to supplant taxis for something to supplant Uber. If it follows that pattern, you won't live to see it, so "easy-out" is probably not the greatest descriptor. That being said, your individual boycott will have a minuscule effect, and money in your pocket is good. I just can't imagine that capitalism is meant to work like this; paying people to use your product until all the competition is gone, then once you're a monopoly jacking prices up to infinity, ditching quality, and regulating or buying out any potential upstarts.
- abakker 7y ago
  A cynical person might say that it is meant to work exactly like this. Killing off older companies seems likely to be a service to progress and the economy. (not to the employees, which is a reason why I'm not a genuine advocate of pure capitalism). nevertheless, There are organizational, bureaucratic, and process debts in addition to technical debt, and I think capitalism acknowledges that in the end, those debts never get paid. Borrow against the future and burn out bright and fast. The good news, is except for capital itself, borrowing technology/process/and bureaucracy against the future is borrowing from yourself, not creditors.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    Every dollar of funding that Uber receives comes from an investor that believes there is a long term business model in Uber. Even the short horizon investors have to believe that, otherwise they would have nobody to sell their shares to in the short term. In terms of killing competition, price wars almost always benefit consumers. Prices go down during a price war, and if the industry is susceptible to them, then another one will occur after the war is over. Look at the airline industry, it’s full of price war cycles. A carrier will try compete on a route, drive prices down, and sometimes this will result in carriers leaving the competition, and prices going back up again afterwards. When that happens, some time will pass, and it will happen again. The worst outcome for consumers is that the market returns to a non-competitive state when the dust settles. In that case, consumers are just back where they started, after having temporarily enjoyed the benefits of the price war. If the market ends up in an unreasonably non-competitive state after the price war, then the victor has just set themselves up for anti-trust action. Every mainstream capitalist economist I’ve ever heard of has firmly believed that regulating competition is an essential part of a capitalist economy. So if you think that’s not happening, it would seem to be a failure of government more that a failure of capitalist economics.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

robryan 7y ago

I don’t think the barrier to entry in a single city market is particularly high. Short of exclusivity on self driving cars I think Uber is only ever one price rise away from losing dominance in a city.

yawz 7y ago

I can ask a similar question: What makes you think that Uber can destroy/prevent the system/model that disrupts another (future) unfair market that it benefitted from? I don't think that Uber is a good example in the original context.

pessimizer 7y ago
Because they can buy out the competition before you've even heard of them?
- prepend 7y ago
  That didn’t work for taxis.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    It did for centuries.

anonuser123456 7y ago

Lyft?

jimbokun 7y ago

Then it's time to apply anti-trust law to Uber. (Assuming Lyft or other companies are no longer viable competitors.)

ken 7y ago
Why not try to apply that to taxis now? Alternatively: why would the government care that a new monopoly replaced what is essentially an old government-approved one?
- dlgeek 7y ago
  Because they no longer get a massive cut?

dahfizz 7y ago

Uber doesn't have the government protections existing cabs do. If Uber starts mistreating their customers, the customers have plenty of other rideshare alternatives.

prepend 7y ago

I think it will be easier to identify pricing problems with Uber than the 50+ different taxi markets. Uber and Lyft can adjust prices quite easily, while taxi markets require local regulators to approve changes. There’s also an issue that theoretically Uber and Lyft compete, where in every city in the US, pretty much, taxis don’t compete on price once it is set for a market. Uber/Lyft might start having anti-consumer prices once they kill all the taxis, but I think they will be subject to closer scrutiny than trying to take on local taxis.