Uber Technologies, Inc.: Accountability in Corporate Culture

This paper examines some of the key factors that contribute to build or erode users’ trust in a platform-based service such as the one provided by Uber Technologies Inc. As clarified by the European Commission, the future Internet cannot succeed without trust of online platforms’ users. The paper explores Uber’s web of relationships with different categories of users, i.e., ‘driver-partners’, ‘riders’, ‘developers’ and ‘business users’ through Uber’s legal and non-legal representations. By analysing Uber ‘legals’ (terms of service, privacy policy, etc.) and the non-legal representations of these norms through the wider Uber community ecosystem (forums, blogs, etc.), it explores how transparency and collective awareness can play a role in sustaining trust. It concludes that the opacity of its ‘legals’ and of its corporate structure could create tensions within the market and undermine the users’ trust. Therefore, the authors recommend that in order to foster trust and ensure fairness, Uber should ensure consistency between its legal and non-legal representation and adopt a more transparent and fair approach in its legals. This would, in turn, empower its users community to participate in the decision making and could provide an example for other platforms.

Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies, 2021

When initiating its Norwegian operations, the transportation platform Uber adjusted its business model to the Norwegian regulation of the taxi market by focusing on its high-end offering, Uber Black, organized through limousine companies who employ the drivers and own the cars. The Uber Black drivers in Oslo are classified as employees and endowed with a substantially flexible work arrangement. Based on a ‘traveling ethnography’ among Uber Black drivers in Oslo, this article conceptualizes Uber’s digital platform as a technological work arrangement. The analysis shows that while the platform is experienced as an opaque form of management that limits the drivers’ formal flexibility, the effects of the technological work arrangement is contingent on the drivers’ formal work arrangement and the characteristics of the Uber Black market in Oslo.

Sharing economy is an economic model in which individuals, corporations, non-profits, and governments collaborate to optimize resources through the redistribution, sharing and reuse of excess capacity in goods and services. It involves ideals of decentralization, sustainability, community-level connectedness, and opposition to hierarchical and rigid regulatory regimes (Shor et al., 2015). Launched in 2009, based on its own version of sharing economy, Uber built and operates a rideshare service seeking to transform and disrupt the taxi industry. The service connects people that need a trip to drivers who use their own cars to provide the service, that is, drivers can offer to “share” their cars with a guest, for a price. Although the taxi industry, and the transit and mobility regulation in general, have long been subject to city-level consumer protection, sharing economy advocates, Uber in particular, claim that these rules are rendered obsolete by the Internet. Indeed, governments have been largely unable to stop Uber’s operations in their jurisdictions precisely because they are conducted primarily over the Internet. Uber has attracted a mixed reaction on the Left, at once intrigued by its possibilities as a new form of social organization but critical of its amplification of precarious labour. Uber is particularly debated in accelerationist theory historically concerned with a radical political response to capitalism that accelerates and exacerbates its uprooting, alienating, abstractive tendencies (Mackey & Avanessian, 2014). This theory has two distinct intellectual directions (Galloway & Noys, 2014): one more to the Left, seeking in the cognitive techno-science labour an alternative to overcome capitalism; the other is dominated by free-market libertarians, aiming to use technology and science to overcome the State, disrupt regulations, and strengthening of neoliberal economic​ relations. Accelerationists defend that instead of destroying neoliberalism, we should reappropriate platforms like Uber toward common ends (Williams & Srnicek, 2013). The paper argues that Uber cannot be reconciled with a Left politics because Uber’s free-market libertarian practices seek to transforms processes but leave structures intact. The outcomes are not disruptive, but well-known consequences of neoliberalism: (1) constrains the productive forces of technology by doing relentless iterations of the same basic service to reduce costs, (2) absorption and corruption of immaterial cultural ideals, such as “sharing,” into profitable business models attractive to large enterprises, (3) precariousness of workforce due to the lack of employee benefits and protections, and (4) a strong discourse for deregulation of economy to avoid liability, privatize and centralize decisions, and enhance profits. Understand Uber’s discourse and practice are important because its magnitude (located in 67 countries and more than 350 cities), its aggressive economic model, and its problematic relation to local governments and the taxi industry.

Under the background of the growth of sharing economy, the number of emerging companies increased in the past decade. As emerging companies, the legality and competitions with relevant industries are subject to dispute. This paper analyzes potential issues and causes of these issues in the operation of these companies from business and enterprise perspectives. The article is taking Uber as an example and accordingly presents the solutions and implementations to existing problems of the future. This paper also extends to the current and future situation of sharing economy for Chinese enterprise.

Revista de Gestão, 2021

Purpose The aim of this article is to test the hypothesis that peer-to-peer technology platforms (Uber) are associated with disruption in the institutional environment, affecting beliefs, norms and users' ways of thinking and acting. Design/methodology/approach Probability sample comprising 843 users (446 passengers; 397 drivers) in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, using a set of indicators was specifically designed for this study. Findings Uber triggers significant changes in the systems of rewards and sanctions, in social preferences, and in entrepreneurial structure and governance, and promotes the coexistence of an institutional logic, hitherto dominant, with new believes, rules, norms and regulatory systems. Originality/value This is a pioneer study that associates institutional approach's elements with technology platforms; the authors also elaborated and utilized an analysis model consisting of a set of completely original indicators capable of mapping and measurin...

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2018

This research aims to empirically examine how Uber has transformed the traditional taxi industry in New York. To this end, we employed a time-series regression model, controlling for various factors that may affect taxi trips, and found no direct evidence that the number of taxi trips, the revenue per driver, or occupancy rates have decreased since Uber entered the market. However, a closer investigation into other dimensions, specifically the degree of dispersion of pickup and drop-off locations, reveals that taxi drivers have been forced to change their way of conducting business in order to retain their market position. Since Uber has crowded out taxis from the central area of Manhattan, the latter have actively responded by serving customers outside of this area. By increasing their geographic coverage and serving customers that were previously ignored, taxis were able to retain their numbers for trips and market share. Our results suggest that the incumbent taxi drivers actively responded to the disruptive threat of Uber's entry and have consequently provided substantial benefits to consumers as taxis can now be hailed from a wider area of New York. We thus found that the sharing economy has transformed the existing market in a positive and welfare-enhancing way.

International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age

Based on a new governance theory as regulatory governance, this article analyzes how a new economy creates new transaction costs at the local level due to the lack of legal coordination based on diversity and competition. The literature focuses on how new platform technologies have decreased existing transaction costs (i.e., online platforms). Surrounded by uncertainties in today’s diverse, complex, competitive, and a fast market environment, the lack of legal coordination has created new transaction costs for digital platform companies. There is limited research on new digital platform company experiences with high transaction costs. There is also limited information on how to overcome these costs, especially due to the lack of legal coordination. This article documents ways to understand how transaction costs are revealed through new technologies. It compares diverse regulatory impacts of the new economy on different localities, including San Francisco and Istanbul. Analyzing Uber as the case company, as well as its relationship with other stakeholders, this article adopts the governance model of regulation to identify the constitutive dynamics of the regulatory challenges. It reveals that local and global e-hail firms in the same country acquired different acceptance and responses in the local market. Thus, the level of transaction costs varied. Local communication based on diversity and competition was derived from the vested interests of lobbying powers, which led to the rising transaction costs. Comparing the local governance in two cities reveals the extent to which transaction costs affect the raison d’etre of companies to perform activities.

Perspectives on Politics, 2018

I use the case of the transportation network company Uber as a lens to explore the comparative politics of the platform economy in Europe and the United States. Within the advanced capitalist world, different countries have responded in very different ways to this new service, from welcome embrace and accommodating regulatory adjustments to complete rejection and legal bans. I analyze Uber’s arrival and reception in the United States, Germany, and Sweden, documenting three very different responses to this disruptive new actor. I show that conflicts over Uber centered on different issues in the three countries. These differences were consequential because the specific regulatory “flashpoints”that Uber provoked mobilized different actors, inspired the formation of different coalitions, and shaped the terms on which conflicts over Uber were framed and fought.

Chapter 6 Uber’s Strategy as a Competitive Business Model of Sharing Economy, 2020

The aim of this chapter is to analyze the different strategies that take Uber to join the global market successfully, positioning itself in different countries, and to analyze how these businesses and strategies that follow become successful to the extent that Uber is doing, not just one city but many in several countries around the world. In order to accomplish this, it is necessary to reference a previous literature review on collaborative economies business model that is appropriate to identify the different theories that may be applicable. As a result, the analysis of this work shows the determining factors that have placed Uber as one of the leading companies within its area of influence and ends with some recommendations on the conflicts that the firm presents when entering a new market.

Technology in Society, 2017

This is an electronic reprint of the original article. This reprint may differ from the original in pagination and typographic detail.

Philosophia Reformata, 2017

This study analyzes a complex case in society, namely, how to distinguish ride-sharing applications, such as Uber, from ordinary taxi enterprises. We conduct a structural analysis of normative practices with distinctions at the following levels: (1) aspects; (2) radical types, genotypes, and phenotypes; (3) part-whole, enkaptic relationships, and interlinkages; and (4) the distinction between qualifying and foundational functions as it is captured in the theory of normative practices. We conclude that the genotype of taxi matchmaking enterprises, of which Uber is an example, represents a novel normativity that could positively serve society and also produce normative challenges, depending on its governance. Therefore, regulators should not dismiss the entire genotype of taxi matchmaking enterprises, but should address the phenotypes that are illegal or that cannot thrive without the illegal behaviors of its users. This conclusion is clear from the structural and directional sides of...

The rise of new software platforms presents regulators and antitrust agencies all over the world with a challenge. Should regulations adapt to the new services of the digital economy? Should competition law change its paradigm in relation to the sharing economy? Despite the growing expansion of these services, in most countries there is still no regulatory framework addressing these problems. Uber is the most emblematic example of this phenomenon. Indeed, it is subject to a large number of ongoing lawsuits merging many issues, ranging from questions pertaining to labour law to problems connected with unfair competition laws. This article first analyses the particular business model adopted by Uber and the antitrust concerns that it could raise. In so doing, the paper pays heed to the approach that antitrust authorities should take towards the complex rivalry between (regulated) incumbents and (unregulated) new entrants. The paper then considers the legal nature of the services provided by Uber, i.e. whether they should be considered as transport services or as services of the information society. Either way, the chosen characterisation will affect the law applied to all digital platforms. The analysis, which adopts a comparative approach, focuses on the European context where national courts are in great turmoil and the CJEU will be issuing a preliminary ruling on the nature of Uber services.

Entry into the taxi industry involves few risks. Entrants have lower costs than the incumbents, sunk costs are small, and modern technology makes it easy to hail a cab using the Internet. Despite large scale entry and low barriers to entry, monopoly power persists. The persistence of monopoly power illustrates that new technologies may not quickly eviscerate monopoly power.

Nordic and Baltic Journal of Information and Communications Technologies, 2017

Uber is just one of the many platform companies growing up currently, but it is certainly one of the most prominent ones and one of the most discussed examples. Uber has created a great deal of antagonism and labor market conflicts around the world. The reason is that Uber-orchestrated services directly substitute for existing taxi business models and regulations and they undermine existing social arrangements including labor rights and tax payments. The approach taken in the paper is concerned with social contracting. Social contracting and theories on social contracts have been known for long, but there is also a new social contract theory discussion on how to deal with labor markets where there is an increasing degree of seemingly 'independent contractors'. This is a development which has many societal roots among them being that ICT platforms reduce transaction costs between individual agents in markets and thus facilitate a larger degree of individualized 'economic agents' (laborers) in markets. This poses great challenges and even threats to existing labor relations and regulations. The contribution of the paper is to make a first attempt at grounding the discussion of these challenges and threats in a social contract perspective.

Mobile computing, the so-called Internet of Things, and the rapid expansion of Internet connectivity all over the world are combining to challenge long-standing assumptions about the mission, function, and reach of traditional organizational forms. Uber is a fast-growing company with several unique attributes: its drivers are not employees, the company does not own the majority of its productive infrastructure, and the management is often at odds with local law and custom. Uber's rapid rise to unprecedented scale serves to illustrate the gaps between traditional organizational assumptions and the reach of current technological capability. To address these gaps, we conclude by suggesting four principles for designing large-scale digital organizations.