Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by inverse_pi 2622 days ago
it's economically unreasonable to drive for more than one apps simultaneously. Now, it could be economically reasonable to drive for more than one apps at many points in the past.

If Lyft and Uber are so easily exchangeable, why is Lyft is still a minority in the US while spending more money?

There's something more interesting here.

1 comments

It's not unreasonable, people do it all the time. Look at the window stickers in a rideshare, if they've got one they've got four, all around Seattle.
like i said it's reasonable to drive for all at different points in the past but it's unreasonable to drive for all 4 at the same time. Think about it, incentive-wise, if you complete 50 trips you got $x , if you complete 100 trips you got $2x. If you only got 50 trips in you, why are you splitting them between two apps 25 trips each and got $0 incentive?
Almost every driver I ride with is switching between the Lyft and Uber apps to see which one is offering better rates/destinations. The incentives appear to be insufficient to offset rate disparity in this market - unclear if that holds true everywhere.
I'm not at all well-versed in statistics, but it seems that without enough extra cash to consistently one-up the competition in terms of incentive structures, a ride share company could not make the driver's choice of which app to use a non-random event. So yes, a driver wouldn't necessarily choose all four at once, but they also wouldn't consistently pick one.
It's a well known fact that the biggest factor in taxi revenues is how much paid miles/km you can do per day. The single biggest factor to increase your revenues is increasing that number.

So unless the incentives are massive, a driver will always look for the next ride by any means necessary. It's nearly never worth it to "wait for a better option".

How many paid miles you do a day. Deadheading is not good.