It has been a rocky year for ride-sharing conglomerate Uber. On the one hand, they’re still bringing in the revenue, to the tune of in $8.25 billion in the second quarter of 2017. On the other, the company has blundered through a series of corporate missteps and PR disasters, ultimately resulting in the forced resignation of CEO Travis Kalanick.
Now, Uber’s drivers are creating headaches for the home office. According to a study released Wednesday, some Uber drivers have developed ways to systematically trick Uber’s management algorithms, gaming the system to maximize their paycheck.
The study was conducted by two professors at London’s University of Warwick and one from New York University, who interviewed Uber drivers in New York and London and read more than 1,000blog posts on popular forum UberPeople.net. Using UberPeople, they found, Uber drivers in a certain area will log off en masse to trick the algorithm into activating surge pricing, then log back on to reap the reward. From the study:
The authors also say some drivers dodge the mandatory but unpopular UberPOOL service—where drivers have to take multiple passengers heading in similar directions,—by logging off after they pick up the first. Ola Henfridsson, of Warwick Business School, one of the study’s authors, explains:
For its part, Uber contests that their algorithms are so easy to dodge.
“This behavior is neither widespread or permissible on the Uber platform,” the company said in a statement, “and we have technical safeguards in place to help prevent it from happening.”
Insofar as it exists, what’s driving this shifty behavior? According to the authors, having an app as your boss doesn’t breed much company loyalty.
“The drivers have the feeling of working for a system rather than a company, and have little if any interaction with an actual Uber employee,” said Lior Zalmonson of New York University. “This creates tension and resentment, especially when drivers can only email to resolve problems. Uber’s strategy is not at all transparent, drivers do not know how decisions are made or even how jobs are allocated, and this creates negative feelings toward the company. So they fight back and have found ways to use the system to their advantage.”
Some of the people of UberPeople wouldn’t disagree.
“Uber has managed the system such that the desperation it fosters in drivers leads to what you’re describing,” one frequent poster said in a discussion about surge pricing. “If Uber paid decently, this would be much less of a ‘problem.’ But if Uber paid decently I’m not convinced it would have much of a business. Its model almost requires the company to be highly and even unfairly exploitive of labor.”
