Operational Transparency: Showing When Work Gets Done

I study how customers respond to operational transparency with parcel delivery data from Cainiao Network, the logistics arm of Alibaba. The sample describes 4.68 million deliveries. Each delivery has between four and ten track-package activities, which customers can check in real time, and a delivery service score, which customers leave after receiving the package. I regress the delivery scores on the track-package-activity times. I show that customers punish early idleness less than late idleness, leaving higher delivery service scores when track-package activities cluster toward the end of the shipping horizon. For example, if a shipment lasts 100 hours, then delaying the time of the average action from hour 20 to hour 80 increases the expected delivery score by approximately the same amount as expediting the arrival time from hour 100 to hour 73.