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Record W4414151078 · doi:10.3982/ecta19106

Who Benefits From Surge Pricing?

2025· article· en· W4414151078 on OpenAlexfundno aff
J. C. Castillo

Bibliographic record

VenueEconometrica · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicTransportation and Mobility Innovations
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersNetwork of European Institutes for Advanced StudyDigital Technology SuperclusterStanford Institute for Economic Policy ResearchUniversity of PennsylvaniaJohn S. and James L. Knight FoundationCharles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard UniversityStanford University
KeywordsBoomWelfareCounterfactual thinkingSurgeMatching (statistics)Salient

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

New technologies have recently led to a boom in real‐time pricing. I study the most salient example, surge pricing in ride hailing. Using data from Uber, I develop an empirical model of spatial equilibrium to measure the welfare effects of surge pricing. The model is composed of demand, supply, and a matching technology. It allows for temporal and spatial heterogeneity as well as randomness in supply and demand. I find that, relative to a uniform pricing counterfactual in which Uber sets the overall price level, surge pricing increases total welfare by 2.15% of gross revenue. Welfare effects differ substantially across sides of the market: rider surplus increases by 3.57% of gross revenue, whereas driver surplus and the platform's current profits decrease by 0.98% and 0.50% of gross revenue, respectively. Riders at all income levels benefit. Among drivers, those who work long hours are hurt the most, especially women.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.378
Threshold uncertainty score0.496

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.202
Teacher spread0.193 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations15
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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