[sokoloff]

I'm not convinced they'll need to raise prices in their core business. Looking at the Boston rates ( http://www.alvia.com/uber-city/uber-boston-2/ ), those seem very much sustainably profitable for drivers @70% share and Uber could surely run the platform for their cut of those figures.

To know whether they could fall back to "just" competing for riders and only operate their core business is something that is not determinable from their released financials. How much engineering is true R&D (self-driving and the like) vs what would be required to run their core ride hailing platform? How much of their marketing spend is in established cities ("Coca Cola" type ad spend) and how much is to launch new cities or incentives to balance the development of the 2-sided market in new cities ("priming the pump" type of spend)?

I think Uber is a constellation of [small] profit-making businesses (most cities that have reached scale) and [large] loss-making businesses (select geographies and R&D efforts).