4 ms·
Maybe you could give a bonus (price reduction, points) to customers that drops a car in an empty station.
by jre 14y ago
Maybe you could give a bonus (price reduction, points) to customers that drops a car in an empty station.
- mikeash 14y agoAnd conversely, penalize trips to extremely popular stations. It ought to be doable purely through economics, although perhaps not without pissing off customers excessively.
- tedunangst 14y agoYou just described airline ticket prices.
- mikeash 14y agoThere are some differences. For example, an airline needs to hire a pilot to fly the plane regardless. For the return trip on a route that's popular in only one direction, if nobody wants to take the plane for a very low price, the airline will fly it empty. For Zipcar, it could conceivably be worthwhile to actually pay customers to drive cars from a popular destination to a popular origin, to avoid having to pay their own workers to do it. But the overall idea is no doubt the same.
- prodigal_erik 14y agoAirlines are doing pure price discrimination, which creates some perverse incentives. Sometimes flying A-C-B is cheaper than A-C, which penalizes us for making C-B seats available, simply because most people going to C are on business. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_booking_ploys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_booking_ploys
- mseebach 14y agoIf you make it a simple surcharge that's then fully payable to whoever will take the car in the opposite direction, it should be transparent enough that people won't see it as gouging.