Sounds like the issue is Uber was not willing to increase the price for that ride to what it should be (which, frankly, could be as much as double the per-mile or per-minute cost of a downtown trip, because of deadheading empty back to downtown, since usually drivers can only find customers in a core "downtown" or other key area(s), and then once they drive them out to the burbs, they are stuck deadheading empty back to the hot area.
I assure you if they had just offered a higher price, some driver would have taken it, assuming that price wasn't then too high for you to be OK with it.
A lot of companies actually underprice their stuff a little relative to the market to avoid outrage and accusations of gouging. It's easy to find these -- look for the shortages. Proper pricing prevents shortages, by definition. But people tend to get a lot more pissed off if once or twice a month, eggs cost $40/carton, than if once or twice a month, eggs have run out by the time they get to the store. The first feels like a human is out to get you, the second seems like a natural accident. Humans aren't rational economic actors.
Of course, this infuriates me as it does anyone with a semester of microeconomics.
I wonder if it may not be that humans are irrational actors so much that they have insufficient data and may not strictly speaking be optimizing for avoiding shortages.
I could see people being upset if they knew that eggs where out because some rich person bought a disproportionate number of them; it's just that normally they can't know.
I think that most people's preference for limited resources would be a low price with a limit on how many a person can purchase (which is what many stores do during shortages). It seems to me that people care more about making sure that everyone can get some eggs without being gouged than they care about avoiding shortages in aggregate.
I assure you if they had just offered a higher price, some driver would have taken it, assuming that price wasn't then too high for you to be OK with it.
A lot of companies actually underprice their stuff a little relative to the market to avoid outrage and accusations of gouging. It's easy to find these -- look for the shortages. Proper pricing prevents shortages, by definition. But people tend to get a lot more pissed off if once or twice a month, eggs cost $40/carton, than if once or twice a month, eggs have run out by the time they get to the store. The first feels like a human is out to get you, the second seems like a natural accident. Humans aren't rational economic actors.
Of course, this infuriates me as it does anyone with a semester of microeconomics.