Emil Michael Q&A On The Role Economists Played At Uber

Dimitri, do you want to come on?

I saw you raise your hand.

I have a question for you about economics and economists and marketplaces. So Uber is very unusual in having economists show up really early to work on both kind of policy stuff that you were talking about with the regulation and so on, but also on product pricing and experimentation. And if you're sort of advising a marketplace now, where and what's kind of the earliest stage where you think economists can add value and where Where would be kind of that, that area within the company?

Economists for us, like you said, they had a few different functions. Probably the most important function they had was trying to prove to the cities that we were a net good for the city, meaning we reduced congestion, we reduced car ownership, we reduced the need for parking in downtown urban areas. And to combat some of the, you know, counter notions, which is, no, you did cause traffic. In fact, you caused more accidents because Uber drivers don't pay attention, or you had more, you know, assaults happen in cities. So it was mostly used in the policy realm. In the pricing and surge and all that, we less used economists and more used algorithms. And finance folks. It was much more of a trading floor on pricing and on policy is much more of an economist sort of thing that was used from a policy standpoint, if that made sense. So, well, you know, look, if you have a marketplace business, you don't have regulatory, everyone loves you and you don't have to have an economist to churn out policy papers, that's great. But if you, I guess if you're in a position where you have to, you do, but it's not something I would seek to do unless you must.