Uber paid high-profile academics in Europe and the US hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce reports that could be used as part of the company’s lobbying campaign.
The Uber files, a cache of thousands of confidential documents leaked to the Guardian, reveal lucrative deals with several leading academics who were paid to publish research on the benefits of the economic model. The reports were ordered as Uber grapples with regulators in key cities around the world.
University economists were targeted in France and Germany, where enforcement by authorities was increasingly brutal in 2014-15.
A report by a French academic, who asked for a €100,000 consulting fee, was cited in a 2016 Financial Times report as evidence that Uber was a “route outside the French banlieues”, which delighted Uber executives.
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What are Uber files?
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The Uber files are a global investigation based on a set of 124,000 documents leaked to the Guardian by Mark McGann, Uber’s former chief lobbyist in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The data consists of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant’s top executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing documents and invoices.
The leaked records cover 40 countries and cover the period from 2013 to 2017, the period when Uber was aggressively expanding around the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, defrauded police and regulators, used 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 make excuses for past behavior that is clearly inconsistent with our current values. Instead, we ask the public to judge us by what we have done in the last five years and what we will do in the years to come.”
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Using techniques common in partisan political campaigns, Uber has tapped academics and think tanks to help it build a positive narrative, namely that it creates good-paying jobs that drivers like, delivers cheap transportation to users and boosts productivity .
Documents show how its lobbyists planned to use academic research as part of a production line for political ammunition that could be fed to politicians and the media.
The aim was to use the research to increase pressure to change the rules, which Uber was avoiding. While Uber’s involvement was mentioned in the reports, the leaked files reveal how it sought to use the work of academics and their reputations to achieve its goals, and how much it was willing to pay them.
In France, the EUR 100,000 consultancy agreement was negotiated with a rising star of university economics, Prof. Augustine Landier of the Toulouse School of Economics. Landier agreed to produce a report, which he described in emails to Uber’s policy and communications team as “applicable to direct PR to make the case for Uber’s positive economic role.”
Landier proposed a collaboration with David Thesmar, another renowned professor at France’s top business school, the 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 in the report “to ensure that it is not presented in a potentially negative light.”
The report came amid an intense debate over job losses caused by Uber, as Emmanuel Macron, then France’s economy minister, tried to impose economic changes.
A member of Uber’s policy team wrote at the time that “quantitative validation of the new type of work that Uber is creating in Europe, especially when done by an economist of Landier’s renown, would help us tremendously.”
Scientists were excited by Uber’s data because it gave them rare real-time evidence of the effect of prices on markets — one of the key questions among liberal economists who argue for 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 indicated that Uber executives were concerned that this would mean “we lose editorial control,” but a senior official concluded, “We see low risk here because we can work with Landier on the wording of the study and also decide what data to share with it. “
The day before Landier and Thesmar’s report was published in March 2016, the FT story quoting it appeared. “Ride-hailing apps have created jobs for poorer youth in Paris, but regulatory constraints loom,” the article said.
Tesmar was quoted in the article as saying that Uber has “changed the social game.”
The report has a third co-author, Daniel Somoru, Uber’s in-house economist. Although his work and an academic consulting agreement with Uber were acknowledged in a footnote, details of the honorarium were not. Neither Szomoru nor the fact that the report was paid for by Uber was mentioned in the FT piece.
Some of the key qualifications in the report did not appear in the press coverage – including the academics’ conclusion that Uber drivers who do not make good money tend to leave the platform.
The report details how these drivers received “payments” of an average of €19.90 per hour. But that didn’t include the significant costs drivers had to pay – such as car hire, insurance and fuel – which had to be deducted from that average ‘payout’ before profits could be calculated. In the FT story, which was retweeted by Landier and others, it became simple: “Most earn €20 an hour, more than twice the minimum wage.”
Uber was excited by the FT story. “Eha!” wrote one person, congratulating the team that “landed” him.
The FT said its article was based on its own extensive reporting from the ground, which covered 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 Tesmar and made clear that his work was based on Uber data and stood by his reports, a spokesman said.
Landier and Thesmar said their paid consulting for Uber was declared and transparent. They declined further comment.
Hubert Horan, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Stigler Center and a longtime critic of Uber’s model, said academics generally ignore the fact that Uber spends billions of dollars of investor money to subsidize both drivers and passengers and that “the payouts ‘ of drivers were not the same as income. Therefore, claims about the quality of jobs or prices are untenable, he argued.
“Uber is using techniques that have proven successful in a partisan political environment to create a widespread belief that a company that has lost over £20bn is highly innovative and creating huge benefits for consumers and cities,” he said. . “It has become an unstoppable PR juggernaut.”
When discussing a quick €10,000 commission for another French economist, Nicolas Bouzou, described as having “high potential to exploit this work in the mainstream media”, Uber executives agreed that organizing it through a think tank would “add credibility to the analysis “. They also talked about “milking” the Landier report at the same time.
Bouzou released his report on Uber in January 2016. He said the report did not claim to be an academic study and that Uber’s funding was disclosed. He acknowledged that the reliability of data from corporate clients was “a big risk for us”, but said he had never tailored his reports to suit a client’s marketing needs.
Prof. Justus Haukapp. Photo: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
In Germany, where authorities cracked down on Uber’s regulatory violations in 2014, Prof. Justus Haukapp, lead economist at the University of Dusseldorf’s Institute for Competitive Economics (DICE), agreed to produce a study on “the consumer benefits of the liberalization of the German taxi market”.
The study was conducted in collaboration with a consultancy unit of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), described by Uber executives in internal emails as “the think tank that has the most influence on the current [German] government’, as the leak implies a fee of €48,000 plus VAT.
The scientists were expected to help promote the research at events and in the press, an expired service agreement and invoices suggest.
Haucap released the report at events for influencers and politicians in Berlin.
Haucap, his consulting firm DICE Consult and DIW said that although 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.
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One of the first deals Uber made with leading academics was with Prof. Alan Krueger of Princeton University in the US in 2015. Krueger was Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser and was known as an authority on raising the legal minimum wage, so there was particularly influential when it came to advocating for Uber’s impact on employment.
Uber’s filings reveal for the first time that he received about $100,000 for a study that was widely cited to support Uber as a creator of good jobs precisely because it operates outside the rules. Internal Uber emails note that he has been “helpful with the press.”
The study subsequently caused controversy. Kruger, who died in 2019, acknowledged his paid consulting work for Uber but never said how much he was paid. Other scientists said his conclusions could not be peer-reviewed because his data were not shared openly.
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