2025/09/15 by B. S. Dhillon and Zhijian Li, X. Ma, Li, Baorui +7
Business, Management and Accounting · Engineering · Social Sciences · #Digital Economy and Work Transformation #FOS: Economics and business #General Economics (econ.GN) #Sharing Economy and Platforms #Transportation and Mobility Innovations
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.11562
openalex publication_date 2025/09/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As platforms increasingly deploy robots alongside human labor in last-mile logistics, little is known about how contextual features like product attributes, environmental conditions, and psychological mechanisms shape consumer preference in real-world settings. To address this gap, this paper conducts an empirical study on consumer choice between human versus robot service, analyzing 241,517 package-level choices from Alibaba's last-mile delivery stations. We identify how product privacy sensitivity, product value, and environmental complexity affect consumer preference. Our findings reveal that consumers are significantly more likely to choose robot delivery for privacy-sensitive packages (11.49%) and high-value products (0.97% per 1% increase in value), but prefer human couriers under adverse weather conditions (1.63%). These patterns are robust to alternative specifications and controls. These results also underscore that delivery choices are shaped not only by functional considerations but also by psychological concerns, highlighting the need for context-aware service design that aligns strategies with consumer perceptions.