IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/elg/eechap/17462_2.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

What is Uber’s business model?

In: Creative Destruction and the Sharing Economy

Author

Listed:
  • .

Abstract

What is Uber’s business model? Uber capitalizes on convenience. In order to do so, it identifies idle capacity, aggregates it and allocates it to consumers willing to pay the price. Uber is an intermediary of idle capacity. This intermediation happens at lower costs, which allows Uber to create value-added to customers. It makes finding a taxicab easier, it provides different service levels, it gives information about the quality and price of the ride and it allows interaction. This value-added is redirected at the company in form of feedback by the customers prompting their trust and loyalty. Characterizing Uber as an intermediary, as a technology platform offering its services as a matchmaker for those willing to sell spare capacity of cars to those willing to pay for this capacity, is therefore correct. Uber could have applied this business model to other different sectors, but it chose transportation. Transportation, however, is not the core of what Uber is. Rather, it is just its application.

Suggested Citation

  • ., 2017. "What is Uber’s business model?," Chapters, in: Creative Destruction and the Sharing Economy, chapter 2, pages 36-62, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:elg:eechap:17462_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781786433428.00007.xml
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wild, Phillip, 2017. "Determining commercially viable two-way and one-way ‘Contract-for-Difference’ strike prices and revenue receipts," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 191-201.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economics and Finance;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:elg:eechap:17462_2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Darrel McCalla (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.e-elgar.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.