If there's a 3rd party aggregator (for taxis, restaurants or whatever), the final price that the customer pays would include both the aggregator's profits + the individual service provider's profits.
If the individual service providers all came together and made an app themselves, the aggregator-profits can be eliminated, resulting in potentially reduced prices for the customers.
I think (probably wrongly) one of the reasons they don't usually come together is because by making such an app they would effectively be helping their competitor(s), which they may not necessarily want to (because they don't see the bigger picture?).
In my city (in Asia) a subset of taxi drivers realized this and even made an app, but it didn't really work well due to poor marketing and because visitors to the city didn't want to set-up a new app just for 2 days etc.
On the other hand, if all the service-providers do co-operatively make an app for their services, what prevents a cartel from developing? The government?
I guess there should be a high baseline level of trust to make it work.
> Maybe it would work better if the local government runs the app (contracted out obvs) and bans all the others.
I like the idea of that but the issue is software that people have to use with no alternative end up having no real motivation to be user friendly or stable or anything like that. They own the market and nobody can ever leave it
If every city has an app, you also lower the trust of the drivers because you don't have a way to know if the passengers are behaving well (good reviews) or not.
If there's a 3rd party aggregator (for taxis, restaurants or whatever), the final price that the customer pays would include both the aggregator's profits + the individual service provider's profits.
If the individual service providers all came together and made an app themselves, the aggregator-profits can be eliminated, resulting in potentially reduced prices for the customers.
I think (probably wrongly) one of the reasons they don't usually come together is because by making such an app they would effectively be helping their competitor(s), which they may not necessarily want to (because they don't see the bigger picture?).
In my city (in Asia) a subset of taxi drivers realized this and even made an app, but it didn't really work well due to poor marketing and because visitors to the city didn't want to set-up a new app just for 2 days etc.
On the other hand, if all the service-providers do co-operatively make an app for their services, what prevents a cartel from developing? The government?
I guess there should be a high baseline level of trust to make it work.