运营管理与智能决策研究院学术讲座

题目: Coordination of Competitive Robots and Workers in On-Demand Logistics Services: Filling in “the Price of Equity”

按需物流服务中机器人与劳动者的协调：弥补“公平的代价”

演讲人:Dr. Yineng Wang, Research Assistant Professor, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

时间: 2026年7月22日13：30

地点: 同济大厦A楼308教室

讲座摘要:

The rapid deployment of robotic technologies creates both efficiency opportunities and displacement risks for human workers in on-demand logistics services. This talk identifies a hidden inefficiency in all-human systems—the “price of equity”—which arises when platforms dispatch orders without accounting for differences in profitability. Using analytical models and real-world data, we show that this practice can reduce platform revenue by as much as 24% during peak demand. We then develop a threshold matching strategy that assigns robots to less profitable, congestion-prone orders while reserving more valuable orders for workers, without differentiating customer service. With an appropriate robot fleet, the strategy can fully recover workers’ earnings losses. We further study strategic robot adoption under public regulation and propose a cross-period coordination mechanism that can double the socially viable robot acquisition cost from roughly CNY 150,000 to CNY 300,000 per vehicle, enabling earlier adoption without harming workers.

演讲嘉宾简介:

Yineng Wang is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She received both her B.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Tsinghua University and subsequently completed her postdoctoral training at The University of Hong Kong. Her research sits at the intersection of operations management, transportation and logistics, and platform economics, with a particular focus on ride-hailing markets, autonomous and robotic services, and AI-enabled service systems. Her work has been published in leading journals, including Production and Operations Management, Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, and Journal of Transport Geography. She is a recipient of the Science and Technology Progress Award from the China Highway and Transportation Society and serves as a reviewer for Transportation Science and Transportation Research Part B: Methodological.