The emergence of robots has had a huge impact on both the labor market and individual work, triggering job insecurity among individuals. To prepare for the coming of the future robot era, we should focus on job insecurity brought about by robots, which will help governments and enterprises to formulate reasonable policies to ensure that robotics will benefit mankind. As technology advances, robots are becoming more and more anthropomorphic. The impact of job insecurity on people’s choice of anthropomorphic robots, however, still needs to be further explored. This paper focuses on how job insecurity affects consumers’ choice of anthropomorphic robots.
First, we use a best-worst scale measure to assess consumer preferences for anthropomorphic robots. Subsequently, we categorize anthropomorphic robots into appearance anthropomorphic robots and emotional anthropomorphic robots, analyzing the impact of job insecurity on consumers’ choice of appearance and emotional anthropomorphic robots and comparing their differences. Then, we assume that there are four types of robotic restaurants and analyze whether job insecurity will also affect the specific social places where consumers choose robots to participate.
As the degree of anthropomorphism of robots increases, the participants' preferences show a trend similar to the Uncanny Valley curve. The job insecurities brought by robots will lead people to resist anthropomorphic robots. They are more resistant to emotional anthropomorphic robots than appearance anthropomorphic robots. The job insecurities brought by robots make consumers resist restaurants with a mixture of humans and highly anthropomorphic robots, but they are willing to accept restaurants only with ordinary robots.
The marginal contribution of this paper is mainly in three aspects. Firstly, from a non-laboratory perspective (using the best-worst scaling method), this paper supports the Uncanny Valley theory. Secondly, as far as we know, this paper is the first to conduct a comparative analysis of the differences between consumers’ choices of robots with physical anthropomorphism and those with emotional anthropomorphism. Thirdly, different from previous literature that only discusses restaurants with a mixture of humans and ordinary robots, this paper meticulously divides restaurants into four types based on the degree of anthropomorphism.
