Recently, “Identity Disclosure and Anthropomorphism in Voice Chatbot Design: A Field Experiment”, a paper written by Professor Dai Hongyan of the Business School in collaboration with Professor Xu Yuqian of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Yan Lianfeng, the partner and VP of technology of  Yunyu Freight, was published in the top international academic journal “Management Science”, and Professor Dai Hongyan was the corresponding author. In 2023, Professor Dai Hongyan successfully published a paper titled “The Interplay of Earnings, Ratings, and Penalties on Sharing Platforms: An Empirical Investigation” in Management Science to research the behaviors and motivation of the crowdsourced workforce. Only one year later, he achieved another great result.

Founded in 1954 and sponsored by the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS), the journal “Management Science” is the oldest and most highly acclaimed top journal in the field of management science and operations research, and also a UTD24 journal and a FT50 journal.

With the widespread application of algorithms and artificial intelligence, the use of chatbots in various business environments is becoming increasingly popular. This paper studies how to effectively use voice chatbots, especially through the optimization of identity disclosure and personification, to improve the operational performance of vehicle-cargo matching. This paper conducted a field experiment in collaboration with a large truck sharing platform, randomly assigning 11,000 truck drivers to answer dispatch calls from the dispatch platform's voice chatbots. The empirical results indicate that disclosing the identity of a chatbot at the beginning of a conversation could have a negative impact on operational performance. However, through adding anthropomorphic features, the response probability, conversation duration and order acceptance rate can be significantly improved. Additionally, the operational results will still be improved when the identity disclosure and anthropomorphic features of chatbots work together. The paper demonstrates the practical role of identity disclosure and personification of voice chatbots in vehicle-cargo matching in the logistics environments. Besides, the anthropomorphic improvement solution proposed in this paper has been implemented successfully and adopted by the Yunyou Freight Platform, providing strong evidence for the commercial value of this research.

Professor Dai Hongyan has conducted long-term and in-depth research in such fields as data-driven optimization decision-making and man-machine interaction and collaboration, obtained rich research results, published more than 40 papers, including those published in MS, EJOR, Journal of Management Science and Engineering, Journal of Management Engineering and other domestic and foreign flagship journals, presided over multiple national, provincial and ministerial-level programs, such as the Training Program of the Major Research Plan of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the General Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and won the first prize of Outstanding Paper Award at the China Logistics Academic Annual Conference, the first prize of the 2020 Science and Technology Progress Award of China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing, the third prize of Science and Technology Progress Award of Zhejiang Province, as well as the first prize of excellent paper awards at several international conferences.