This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanthan.

My guest today is Keith Chen.

He's a behavioral economist at UCLA.

He's also the head of economic research at Uber, the right-sharing company.

Keith's going to talk about some of the behavioral anomalies that Uber has observed,

and we're then going to talk about some of Keith's earlier work,

the evolutionary and cultural origins of certain biases and heuristics.

Keith Chen, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thank you so much for having me and the big fan of the podcast.

I want to start by talking about surge pricing.

Uber charges more when demand is high based on the idea that this is going to draw more drivers into the pool

and increase the supply of rights.

Now this makes perfect sense from the point of view for traditional economists,

but you're a behavioral economist and you must know there's something about

charging different prices for the same products that rubs customers the wrong way.

They say, hey, five minutes ago this ride was $10, now it's 20.

As you can imagine, I hear over and over again, both at my dinner table and at family gatherings

that surge pricing can feel very unfair to customers.

But it's been a really integral part of Uber's success precisely because

the whole goal of the company was to replace a really frustrating experience with taxi,

with service that's just ultimately reliable.

And the only way to do that, the only way to be able to get basically everyone

...