Understanding and Mitigating the Robot Disadvantage in Luxury Services: The Role of Desire for Superiority

Shuang Ma, Lin Ge, Michael Jia, Yonggui Wang In recent years, the use of service robots in the lodging, dining, and retail sectors has become more prevalent. Service robots offer various benefits, such as reducing operational costs, improving service efficiency, enabling 24-hour support, and ensuring consistent service quality. However, our research indicates that service firms do not uniformly benefit from service robot deployment across all service settings. Specifically, we show that customers’ relative preference for service robots over human service providers is lower in luxury services than in mainstream services. We call it the robot disadvantage in luxury services. This disadvantage arises because service robots—as nonhuman service providers—cannot make customers feel that they are being served as a prestigious customer of superior social status over service providers. To address this challenge, we propose two effective strategies for luxury service firms. First, luxury service firms may emphasize the concept of social equality in their communications. Second, luxury service firms may frame the use of service robots as an exclusive privilege. Both approaches can mitigate customers’ resistance to robots in luxury services.