Interesting question about the pricing relative to NYSE. There are many intermediaries between a customer and NYSE which have historically had pretty high fees

Interesting question about the pricing relative to NYSE. There are many intermediaries between a customer and NYSE which have historically had pretty high fees which are all getting taken by Uber in this case. Those fees (and corrupt business practices) were eliminated by electronic trading, increasing competition, and high frequency trading. And exchanges such as NYSE themselves only lowered their fees in response to competitor exchanges (there are 13 right now in the US, with 3 more launching this year), which is an obvious way to improve things. So I'd say the difference is the lack of competition in general. I guess one obvious reason for lack of competition is network effects. The intermediaries in the stock market at least allowed for a layer of abstraction that could be swapped around without that being visible to the customer. So, a fairly obvious conclusion in the end: The fact that the exchange component and the end user interface are bundled together reduces competition and keeps these prices high. I'm sure eventually someone will figure out a clever way to make an independent UI that abstracts over Uber/Lyft/etc despite none of them wanting that, and that should introduce a lot more competition and lower prices.