In effect, Mr. Sheldon was saying, the generally rational beings that most economists presume to exist are made, not born — at least as far as their Uber driving is concerned.

The Uber evidence does highlight some points on which both sides of the debate already agreed, like the idea that drivers get better at wringing more money out of the hours they work as they gain experience.

“The learning effect doesn’t bother any principle of economics,” said Colin Camerer, an economics professor at the California Institute of Technology and the lead author of the pioneering study showing that many cabdrivers violate an economist’s idea of rationality.

Henry Farber, a Princeton economist and author of several studies affirming the traditional view, echoed this sentiment, saying even his papers suggest that beginners frequently do not drive enough when business is brisk. “New drivers who can’t figure it out leave the business,” he said. “The ones who stay tend to learn.”

Professor Camerer and Richard Thaler, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the original paper, also posit a middle-ground position for which there is broader support: It may be that cabdrivers and other workers set goals like an income target and just are not fanatical about hitting them. They may simply ignore the target when their hourly wage lurches beyond a certain amount in one direction or the other.

Still, the question of whether many drivers hew closely enough to an income target that they tend to work longer hours when driving pays less than usual, and shorter hours when it pays more, opened a crucial divide.

The conventional view is that while people may fall short of what economics textbooks recommend, sometimes far short when they are just starting off at farming or repairing refrigerators or driving a cab, they usually do not act in the opposite of their self-interest, which is what sticking with an income target would cause them to do.