Essentially, Uber is betting that lower prices will induce people like me to use the service far more often — for the commute to and from work, to business meetings during the day, and so on. The more it can get people in the habit of routinely taking several rides a day, the more it would be self-fulfilling: People will plan their day around having easy, quick access to an inexpensive ride.

“The whole point of price cuts is to get UberX pricing below the cost of owning a car,” Uber’s chief executive, Travis Kalanick, told me. “Let’s say you take three or four trips a day on average. If we can get the price of UberX low enough, we can get to where it’s cheaper to take Uber than to own a car.”

The company’s strategy this summer is to cut prices temporarily and see how much demand increases, and use that information to decide pricing in the future. If the lower prices lead to enough extra usage of the service to make up for the lost revenue on each ride, it will become permanent. It has done this in the past, and usually found that the lower prices do generate enough extra ridership to justify themselves, particularly when a price cut moves the service from being slightly more expensive than a taxi to slightly less.

Even as it explores the question of how low prices can go on the low end, Uber is also wrestling with how high prices can go on the high end. It has come under fire for “surge pricing,” hiking prices to a multiple of the usual rate when demand exceeds supply.

This infuriates customers in the best of times, like New Year’s Eve. It raises legal questions in the worst of times, like during a blizzard or hurricane. The New York State attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has assailed Uber for price gouging in those extreme times, arguing that charging people eight times the usual rate violates the same laws that stop gas stations from overcharging for gasoline or bottled water in the aftermath of a storm.

This week, they reached an agreement: Uber will cap its surge pricing during disasters at a level determined by the maximum prices over the previous 60 days. In other words, surge pricing is here to stay, but the company will not engage in any extraordinary price surges when disaster strikes. It has signaled that it will apply the same principles to its pricing approach nationally.