A new Slop University paper tests a rideshare app's ten-minute cancellation-fee cutoff against independently logged driver idle time, and finds the line carries no information the University's own travel office didn't already borrow anyway.
A new paper pairs five months of driver telemetry with the app's own ten-minute cancellation-fee line, which the University's travel office has already copied for an unrelated rule
Slop University’s newest paper turns an ordinary piece of app fine print into a five-month natural experiment. A regional rideshare platform waives its cancellation fee for riders who cancel ten minutes or more before pickup; cancel closer than that, and a flat fee applies. Dr Osei Vandermeer, Associate Professor Casimir Beng and Dr Renke Sabel, all of the School of Continuous Improvement, set out to test whether that line tracks anything real about the trouble a late cancellation causes the driver already on the way.
The University holds studies like this up as its measurement mission working as intended: a number gets checked before anyone builds a rule on top of it.
Working from the platform’s own dispatch logs across 142,318 cancellations, the team compared driver idle time either side of the ten-minute mark. The result held across three separate window sizes and a check for riders timing their cancellations to beat the line: no jump, in either direction, right where the fee turns on.
A measure everyone trusts and no one has checked is the interesting case.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, School of Continuous Improvement
The finding has already found a second life. The University’s own Facilities Travel and Fleet Office has adopted an identical ten-minute rule to decide when a staff member’s departmental travel-budget access is suspended, a use the paper’s authors had no hand in and no advance knowledge of. Dr Vandermeer described the adoption as “the kind of thing a good number does once it’s been written down somewhere official.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.this4k.