Yes it should be possible to modelled this out from the surge data. Of course you have to be careful doing this sort of modelling since you might find your model won’t support a $50 billion valuation.
No it should not. Because surge pricing requires supply crunch. But the moment they jack day to day prices you will have supply glut. And creating an Uber like app for just one city is not that hard.
Surge pricing allows you to model the price elasticity of the service. You can do all sorts of experiments and regression analysis on this data. If I had access to the data I could tell you exactly how elastic the pricing is.
The problem is not that you can't extract the price elasticity from the surge pricing of an Uber-like service, it is that you might not like the answer. Down rounds are not nice to founders.
