A Modern Day Horror Story: kick-ons, 5am. The come down is starting, and you’ve just realised with horror that you don’t know the person sitting next to you. Your gum has basically disintegrated. You just want to be home, like, now. You pull out your phone to call an Uber, only to find… you’re on five percent. *SCREAMS*
In legit horrifying news, Uber knows that you’re more likely to accept surge pricing when your battery is low – but they promise not to use this information against you.
Uber’s head of economic research Keith Chen told American radio syndicate NPR as much last week.
“A data scientist named Peter at Uber discovered somewhat accidentally this really, really kind of interesting fact,” he said. “And that is one of the strongest predictors of whether or not you are going to be sensitive to surge – in other words, whether or not you are going to kind of say, oh, 2.2, 2.3, I’ll give it a 10 to 15 minutes to see if surge goes away – is how much battery you have left on your cell phone.”
FASCINATING! said host Shandkar Vedantam.
“Yeah, like when your cell phone is like down to like below 5 percent battery and that little icon on the iPhone turns red, you know, then people start saying, well, I better get home, like, because I don’t quite know how I’m going to get home otherwise,” continued Chen. “And we absolutely don’t use that to kind of like push you a higher surge price, but it’s an interesting kind of psychological fact of human behaviour.”
But they’re very definitely, absolutely not going to use this to squeeze more money out of you. Definitely.
In the same interview, Chen revealed that another indicator of whether or not you’re going to “be sensitive” to surge pricing (guaranteed there was an internal memo to use “be sensitive” instead of “accept”) was if the surge was an odd number.
“When you tell someone, ‘Your trip is going to be two times more than it normally costs,’ they think, ‘Wow, that’s capricious and unfair’,” he said.“Whereas if you say ‘Your trip is going to cost 2.1 times more than it normally does – wow, you know, there must be some smart algorithm in the background here that’s at work. It doesn’t seem quite as unfair.”
Speaking as someone who has never once looked at 2.1 surcharging and thought “seems legit” – pack’er up, boys. The end is nigh.
