报告题目：Human Advantage in Service Roles: Evidence from a Restaurant Chain

报告摘要：While many service tasks appear readily codifiable, their automation can paradoxically reduce the value created for customers. Using data from a restaurant chain, we demonstrate that service workers outperform digital systems by leveraging local information to adapt to customer heterogeneity and operational conditions, resulting in higher sales per order and improved satisfaction. Using an unexpected technological failure that forced a restaurant chain to temporarily revert from digital ordering to human service, we show that human servers increase revenue per order by 6.5% despite operating under severe staffing constraints. This performance gap emerges not from uniform superiority, but from humans’ ability to tailor approaches based on customer characteristics, operational constraints, and firm objectives. Our findings reveal a critical hidden cost of automation: the loss of human-generated value may outweigh labor cost savings.

报告时间：4月28日10:00

地 点：小白楼105会议室

主讲人简介：孙昂，现任中国人民大学财政金融学院教授，中国人民大学吴玉章特聘教授，同时担任Journal of Development Economics副主编，Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization副主编和《经济管理学刊》编委。她分别在北京大学和布朗大学获得经济学学士、硕士和博士学位，主要研究领域包括发展经济学、劳动经济学、公共经济学以及中国经济。近年来，孙昂教授在Review of Economics and Statistics、Journal of Development Economics、Management Science、Journal of Human Resources、Demography和《经济研究》等国内外权威学术期刊发表论文二十余篇，并有多篇论文正处于国际一流期刊的审稿和修订阶段。她还主持了多项国家级和其他各级科研项目，包括国家自然科学基金面上项目和国家自然科学基金青年项目等。