I remember seeing this app a couple months ago and being excited about a team finally doing this. They’ve been available in New York City for a while and now they’re trying to raise money to expand to more places. Hopefully they open source the app\server in the future since it would be great to have more co-op apps for the other “gig economy” style apps.
How come?
Because in any dispute between a driver and a customer, drivers will protect drivers.
Do you care more about the credibility of a business that you do have an ownership stake in or one you don’t have an ownership stake in?
The drivers have a collective interest in maintaining the credibility of their app regardless of how the ownership is structured. There will be a similar management structure to ensure customer satisfaction regardless of ownership structure.
Moreover if you’re an individual driver with an ownership stake you have a greater interest in maintaining the credibility of your business vs a business that some one else owns.
So in theory there should be slightly greater incentive to provide good service under this structure.
In real life, people are subject to biases and heuristics even if they think that they are acting in their best interest. This is what many economic theories fail to take into account. Moreover, within the organization different subjects would have different economic interests and means to achieve them.
You might be able to say that drivers would be more likely to offer each additional resources (education or perhaps other more material resources) to ensure quality of service over investors who would be more likely to fire drivers. Others have pointed out that they have co-operatively owned taxi services in Europe and this doesn’t seem to cause issues in terms of quality control.
What I described seem to me to be the most evident biases and heuristics that the drivers would be subject to. What other biases and heuristics specifically are you concerned about?
Right, I see what you mean, so there’d be a power imbalance there. From my perspective, if drivers buddy-buddied with each other to that degree, customers would just flock back to Uber and the business would tank pretty fast. It would be more beneficial for the drivers to treat their customers well.