Phone about to die? Uber will charge you more.
![uber app in front of a map](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6400f5db669916305f63913b/666b6b67b3763d8acd38e335_AD_4nXemvP1SXl6ztUEzI7REEAiBRzPTnFow-0juNETsH22Kdmyd7P3Dt47y18KEp3m6a08h5Z9yiuNw1wvCIh2tes2g_qJqB_mq9C4ft0XE1sd6s5StT4kC5qmC1RGE4naIezcsrIGVLwGrt4_KgUuuhZlub0b7.jpeg)
Uber charges you higher prices when you’re most desperate, such as when your phone battery is about to run out.
Lina Khan, the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, shared one of the more disturbing things they found when researching personalized pricing regarding Uber prices in this Belgium study:
- It was two people at the very same time.
- One person had 84% on their battery, and the other had 12%.
- The 12% person was charged more from the same location going to the same place.
Personalized pricing, or “surveillance pricing,” was once a theoretical exercise for economists to see whether it created surplus value.
This 2024 MIT study concluded that personalized pricing lowers consumer surplus by 2.5% (consumers are getting less of a deal) and increases overall surplus by 5.2% (businesses capture more value potentially cause they can charge higher prices to those willing to pay more).
We’re now reaching a reality where companies have collected enough data to implement personalized pricing at scale.