Uber’s files, a cache of thousands of confidential documents leaked to the Guardian, reveal lucrative deals with several leading academics paid to publish research on the benefits of its economic model. The reports were commissioned as Uber battled with regulators in key cities around the world. University economists were targeted in France and Germany, where enforcement was increasingly tough in 2014-15. A report by a French academic, who claimed a €100,000 consulting fee, was cited in a 2016 Financial Times report as evidence that Uber was “a street outside the French banlieues”, delighting Uber executives. Q&A
What are Uber records?
projection The Uber Files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents leaked to the Guardian by Mark MacGann, Uber’s former chief lobbyist in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The data consists of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the top executives of the Silicon Valley giant, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing documents and invoices. The leaked records cover 40 countries and span from 2013 to 2017, the period when Uber was aggressively expanding around the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, deceived police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments around the world. To facilitate a global public interest investigation, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ. In a statement, Uber said: “We have not and will not condone past behavior that is clearly inconsistent with our current values. Instead, we’re asking the public to judge us based on what we’ve done in the last five years and what we’ll do in the years to come.” Thanks for your response. Using techniques common to partisan campaigns, Uber targeted academics and thinktanks to help it create a positive narrative, namely that it created well-paying jobs that drivers liked, provided cheap transportation to consumers and increased productivity. Documents show how his lobbyists planned to use academic research as part of a production line of political ammunition that could be fed to politicians and the media. The goal was to use the investigation to increase pressure to change the rules that Uber was avoiding. While Uber’s involvement was mentioned in reports, the leaked files reveal how it wanted to use the academics’ work and their reputations to further its goals, and how much it was willing to pay them. In France, the €100,000 consultancy deal was negotiated with a rising star in university finance, Professor Augustin Landier of the Toulouse School of Economics. Landier agreed to write a report that he described in emails to Uber’s policy and communications team as “potential for immediate PR to demonstrate Uber’s positive economic role.” Landier suggested working with David Thesmar, another high-profile professor from France’s top business school, École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC). In discussions in February 2015, Uber executives noted that while the price was high, it was worth it, especially if they worked on the messaging of the show “to make sure it’s not presented in a potentially negative light.” The report came amid heated debate over job losses caused by Uber, with Emmanuel Macron, then France’s economy minister, trying to impose economic changes. A member of Uber’s policy team wrote at the time that “a quantitative validation of the new type of jobs Uber is creating in Europe, especially when conducted by an economist of Landier’s renown, would help us immensely.” Scholars were excited by Uber’s data because it gave them rare real-time data on the effect of prices on markets — one of the key issues among liberal economists who support free markets. Uber says opening its data to researchers has provided important insights into the changing nature of work and mobility. Photo: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock In exchange for the consulting fee, Landier also wanted to produce a separate unpaid study using Uber data. The leak shows that Uber executives were concerned it would mean “we lose editorial control,” but a senior executive concluded: “We see low risk here because we can work with Landier to shape the study and also decide what data to share.” with him. “ The day before Landier and Thesmar’s report was published in March 2016, the FT story citing it appeared. “Ride-hailing apps have created jobs for Paris’s poorest youth, but a regulatory crackdown looms,” the article says. Thesmar was quoted in the article as saying that Uber was a “social game changer.” The report had a third co-author, Daniel Szomoru, an internal economist at Uber. While his employment and academic consulting agreement with Uber was acknowledged in a footnote, details of the pay were not admitted. Neither Szomoru nor the fact that the report was paid for by Uber was mentioned in the FT piece. Some of the key criteria in the report did not appear in press coverage – including the academics’ conclusion that Uber drivers who were not making good money tended to leave the platform. The report describes how these drivers received “payments” of an average of €19.90 an hour. But that didn’t account for the significant costs drivers have to pay – such as car hire, insurance and fuel – which had to be deducted from that average ‘payment’ before profits could be calculated. The FT story, retweeted by Landier and others, put it simply: “Most earn €20 an hour, more than twice the minimum wage.” Uber was excited by the FT’s story. “Wow!” wrote one person, congratulating the team for “landing” her. The FT said its article was based on its own extensive field reporting covering the downsides of driving for Uber, including low pay, as well as benefits, and that it had not been proactively approached or briefed by Uber. He cited experts other than Thesmar and made it clear that his work was based on Uber data and relied on its reports, a spokesman said. Landier and Thesmar said their paid consulting for Uber was declared and transparent. They declined to comment further. Hubert Horan, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Stigler Center and a longtime critic of Uber’s model, said academics have generally ignored the fact that Uber was spending billions of dollars in cash from investors to subsidize both drivers and passengers, and that “payments” to drivers were not the same as income. Therefore, claims about the quality of jobs or prices were unsustainable, he argued. “Uber used techniques that had proven successful in partisan political environments to create the widespread belief that a company that lost over £20 billion was highly innovative and created huge benefits for consumers and cities,” he said. “He became an unstoppable public juggler.” When discussing a quick commission of €10,000 for another French economist, Nicolas Bouzou, who he described as having “high potential to leverage this project in the mainstream media,” Uber executives agreed that organizing through a thinktank would “add reliability in analysis’. They also talked about “milking” the Landier report at the same time. Bouzou published his report on Uber in January 2016. He said the report did not claim to be an academic study and claimed Uber’s funding. He acknowledged that the reliability of data from corporate clients was “a significant risk for us,” but said he never framed his reports to suit a client’s marketing needs. Professor Justus Haucap. Photographer: Ulstein Bild/Getty Images In Germany, where authorities cracked down on Uber’s regulatory violations in 2014, Professor Justus Haucap, a leading economist at the University of Dusseldorf’s Institute for Competition Economics (DICE), agreed to produce a study on the “consumer benefits of deregulation of the German taxi market”. The study was conducted in collaboration with a consultancy division of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), described by Uber executives in internal emails as “the most influential think tank with the current [German] government”, for what the leak suggested was a fee of €48,000 plus VAT. The academics were expected to help promote the research at events and to the press, a leaked service agreement and invoices suggest. Haucap presented the exhibition at events for influencers and politicians in Berlin. Haucap, consultancy firm DICE Consult and DIW said that while the data was provided by Uber, the study met strict independent, scientific standards and was not predetermined by Uber. They added that it was identified as a paid report for Uber. Contact integration One of the first deals Uber struck with leading academics was with Professor Alan Kruger at Princeton University in the US in 2015. Kruger was Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser and was famously an authority on raising the legal minimum wage, so was particularly influential when it came to supporting Uber’s impact on employment. Uber records reveal for the first time that it was paid about $100,000 for a study that was widely cited as supporting Uber as a creator of good jobs precisely because it operated outside the rules. Internal Uber emails note that he was “helpful with the press.” The study subsequently attracted controversy. Kruger, who died in 2019, acknowledged his paid consulting work for Uber but never said how much he was paid. Other academics said his conclusions could not be peer-reviewed because his data were not shared openly. Uber said that…
title: “Uber Paid Academics Six Figures For Research To Feed The Media Uber " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-07” author: “Lauren Mark”
Uber’s files, a cache of thousands of confidential documents leaked to the Guardian, reveal lucrative deals with several leading academics paid to publish research on the benefits of its economic model. The reports were commissioned as Uber battled with regulators in key cities around the world. University economists were targeted in France and Germany, where enforcement was increasingly tough in 2014-15. A report by a French academic, who claimed a €100,000 consulting fee, was cited in a 2016 Financial Times report as evidence that Uber was “a street outside the French banlieues”, delighting Uber executives. Q&A
What are Uber records?
projection The Uber Files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents leaked to the Guardian by Mark MacGann, Uber’s former chief lobbyist in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The data consists of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the top executives of the Silicon Valley giant, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing documents and invoices. The leaked files cover 40 countries and span from 2013 to 2017, the period when Uber was aggressively expanding around the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, deceived police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments around the world. To facilitate a global public interest investigation, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ. In a statement, Uber said: “We have not and will not condone past behavior that is clearly inconsistent with our current values. Instead, we’re asking the public to judge us based on what we’ve done in the last five years and what we’ll do in the years to come.” Thanks for your response. Using techniques common to partisan campaigns, Uber targeted academics and thinktanks to help it create a positive narrative, namely that it created well-paying jobs that drivers liked, provided cheap transportation to consumers and increased productivity. Documents show how his lobbyists planned to use academic research as part of a production line of political ammunition that could be fed to politicians and the media. The goal was to use the investigation to increase pressure to change the rules that Uber was avoiding. While Uber’s involvement was mentioned in reports, the leaked files reveal how it wanted to use the academics’ work and their reputations to further its goals, and how much it was willing to pay them. In France, the €100,000 consultancy deal was negotiated with a rising star in university finance, Professor Augustin Landier of the Toulouse School of Economics. Landier agreed to write a report that he described in emails to Uber’s policy and communications team as “potential for immediate PR to demonstrate Uber’s positive economic role.” Landier suggested working with David Thesmar, another high-profile professor from France’s top business school, École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC). In discussions in February 2015, Uber executives noted that while the price was high, it was worth it, especially if they worked on the messaging of the show “to make sure it’s not presented in a potentially negative light.” The report came amid heated debate over job losses caused by Uber, with Emmanuel Macron, then France’s economy minister, trying to impose economic changes. A member of Uber’s policy team wrote at the time that “a quantitative validation of the new type of jobs Uber is creating in Europe, especially when conducted by an economist of Landier’s renown, would help us immensely.” Scholars were excited by Uber’s data because it gave them rare real-time data on the effect of prices on markets — one of the key issues among liberal economists who support free markets. Uber says opening its data to researchers has provided important insights into the changing nature of work and mobility. Photo: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock In exchange for the consulting fee, Landier also wanted to produce a separate unpaid study using Uber data. The leak shows that Uber executives were concerned it would mean “we lose editorial control,” but a senior executive concluded: “We see low risk here because we can work with Landier to shape the study and also decide what data to share.” with him. “ The day before Landier and Thesmar’s report was published in March 2016, the FT story citing it appeared. “Ride-hailing apps have created jobs for Paris’s poorest youth, but a regulatory crackdown looms,” the article says. Thesmar was quoted in the article as saying that Uber was a “social game changer.” The report had a third co-author, Daniel Szomoru, an internal economist at Uber. While his employment and academic consulting agreement with Uber was acknowledged in a footnote, details of the pay were not admitted. Neither Szomoru nor the fact that the report was paid for by Uber was mentioned in the FT piece. Some of the key criteria in the report did not appear in press coverage – including the academics’ conclusion that Uber drivers who were not making good money tended to leave the platform. The report describes how these drivers received “payments” of an average of €19.90 an hour. But that didn’t account for the significant costs drivers have to pay – such as car hire, insurance and fuel – which had to be deducted from that average ‘payment’ before profits could be calculated. The FT story, retweeted by Landier and others, put it simply: “Most earn €20 an hour, more than twice the minimum wage.” Uber was excited by the FT’s story. “Wow!” wrote one person, congratulating the team for “landing” her. The FT said its article was based on its own extensive field reporting covering the downsides of driving for Uber, including low pay, as well as benefits, and that it had not been proactively approached or briefed by Uber. He cited experts other than Thesmar and made it clear that his work was based on Uber data and relied on its reports, a spokesman said. Landier and Thesmar said their paid consulting for Uber was declared and transparent. They declined to comment further. Hubert Horan, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Stigler Center and a longtime critic of Uber’s model, said academics have generally ignored the fact that Uber was spending billions of dollars in cash from investors to subsidize both drivers and passengers, and that “payments” to drivers were not the same as income. Therefore, claims about the quality of jobs or prices were unsustainable, he argued. “Uber used techniques that had proven successful in partisan political environments to create the widespread belief that a company that lost over £20 billion was highly innovative and created huge benefits for consumers and cities,” he said. “He became an unstoppable public juggler.” When discussing a quick commission of €10,000 for another French economist, Nicolas Bouzou, who he described as having “high potential to leverage this project in the mainstream media,” Uber executives agreed that organizing through a thinktank would “add reliability in analysis’. They also talked about “milking” the Landier report at the same time. Bouzou published his report on Uber in January 2016. He said the report did not claim to be an academic study and claimed Uber’s funding. He acknowledged that the reliability of data from corporate clients was “a significant risk for us,” but said he never framed his reports to suit a client’s marketing needs. Professor Justus Haucap. Photographer: Ulstein Bild/Getty Images In Germany, where authorities cracked down on Uber’s regulatory violations in 2014, Professor Justus Haucap, a leading economist at the University of Dusseldorf’s Institute for Competition Economics (DICE), agreed to produce a study on the “consumer benefits of deregulation of the German taxi market”. The study was conducted in collaboration with a consultancy division of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), described by Uber executives in internal emails as “the most influential think tank with the current [German] government”, for what the leak suggested was a fee of €48,000 plus VAT. The academics were expected to help promote the research at events and to the press, a leaked service agreement and invoices suggest. Haucap presented the exhibition at events for influencers and politicians in Berlin. Haucap, consultancy firm DICE Consult and DIW said that while the data was provided by Uber, the study met strict independent, scientific standards and was not predetermined by Uber. They added that it was identified as a paid report for Uber. Contact integration One of the first deals Uber struck with leading academics was with Professor Alan Kruger at Princeton University in the US in 2015. Kruger was Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser and was famously an authority on raising the legal minimum wage, so was particularly influential when it came to supporting Uber’s impact on employment. Uber records reveal for the first time that it was paid about $100,000 for a study that was widely cited as supporting Uber as a creator of good jobs precisely because it operated outside the rules. Internal Uber emails note that he was “helpful with the press.” The study subsequently attracted controversy. Kruger, who died in 2019, acknowledged his paid consulting work for Uber but never said how much he was paid. Other academics said his conclusions could not be peer-reviewed because his data were not shared openly. Uber said that…
