Over the past 20 years, behavioral economists have found evidence for a phenomenon known as income targeting, in which workers who can decide how long to work<br />each day, like cabdrivers, do so with a goal in mind — say, $100 — much the way marathon runners try to get their time below four hours or three hours.<br />“The whole thing is like a video game,” said Eli Solomon, a veteran Uber<br />and Lyft driver in the Chicago area, who said he sometimes had to fight the urge to work more after glancing at his data.<br />The consultants devised an experiment in which the company showed one group of inexperienced drivers how much more they would<br />make by moving from a slow period like Tuesday morning to a busy time like Friday night — about $15 more per hour.<br />“If you need to pick up your kids at soccer practice at 6 p.m.,” said Nundu Janakiram, the Uber official in charge of products<br />that improve drivers’ experiences, “it will start to give you trips to take you in the general direction to get to a specific place in time.”<br />There is also the possibility that as the online gig economy matures, companies like Uber may adopt a set of norms<br />that limit their ability to manipulate workers through cleverly designed apps.<br />“The optimal default we set is that we want you to do as much work as there is to do,” he said of the company’s app.<br />“I’ve got screen shots with dozens of these messages,” said Mr. Streeter, who began driving full time for Lyft<br />and then Uber in 2014 but quit last year to invest in real estate.<br />“If what you’re doing is basically saying, ‘We’ve found a cheap way to get you to do work without paying you for it, we’ll pay you in badges<br />that don’t cost anything,’ that’s a manipulative way to go about it,” he said.
