| Personal website | https://www.reubenbinns.com/ |
| Institutional page | https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/reuben.binns/ |
| Bluesky | @rdbinns.bsky.social |
@jmlstein This analysis was made possible by Worker Info Exchange's efforts to help Uber drivers access their trip data using rights under the GDPR.
Coverage on ITV: https://www.itv.com/news/2025-06-18/dynamic-pricing-benefits-uber-but-customers-and-drivers-worse-off-study-says
- drivers spend an extra 23 minutes a day waiting for trips
- Uber’s income per driver hour rose from £8.47 to £11.70
- Uber's take rate (the % of the customer fare they keep) has risen from 25% to 29% on average, sometimes going up to 50%.
Perversely, the more the customer pays per hour, the less the driver gets paid.
Dynamic pricing has made good work less predictable, undermining drivers' tacit knowledge ...
New paper accepted at #FAccT2025, led by Jake Stein @jmlstein and me, "Not Even Nice Work If You Can Get It; A Longitudinal Study of Uber's Algorithmic Pay and Pricing" arxiv.org/abs/2506.15278
Over the last 3 years, we've been working with Worker Info Exchange to audit Uber's algorithms.
We analysed 1.5m trips, before/after dynamic pricing intro'd in 2023, and found:
- customer fares per hour are up £32.82 to £43.50
- driver pay per hour fell from £22.20 to £19.06 ...
Through longitudinal analysis of 1.5 million trips from 258 drivers in the UK, we find that after dynamic pricing, pay has decreased, Uber’s cut has increased, job allocation and pay is less predictable, inequality between drivers is increased, and drivers spend more time waiting for jobs. In addition to these findings, we provide methodological and theoretical contributions to algorithm auditing, gig work, and the emerging practice of worker data science.
About 15 years ago, 80s retro clothes were back in fashion. In the last 5 years, kids started dressing in mid late 90s clothes.
I recently saw a guy dressed in 80s clothes, and thought 'his style is either 15 years or 30 years out of date'.
Fashion requires modular arithmetic.
'There are lots of fantastic machine learning papers with great ideas, but they rarely define what they are supposed to do ... I'd love to work on alignment, but nobody has defined what it means'
- Shafi Goldwasser (rough transcription from her Strachey lecture https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/2646.html)
In Tottenham, London, the PeopleVsElon campaign group walked into a Tesla showroom and placed a cardboard cut-out of Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute next to the cars.
The manager of the Tesla showroom threatened to sue activist India Thorogood if he saw it online. Her response - "But it's just a Roman salute!"
Our greatest mathematicians don't know why counting works and it DRIVES them CRAZY!
"I have tried, with little success, to get some of my friends to understand my amazement that the abstraction of integers for counting is both possible and useful. Is it not remarkable that 6 sheep plus 7 sheep make 13 sheep?"
Ben Waber
Sean Kleefeld
ProjectFearlessness