Meituan lets volunteer 'kangaroo jury' users settle small order and review disputes

WIRED reported in January 2022 on Meituan's dispute service, launched in January 2020 inside its delivery and review apps. In one case cited from Zhejiang News, a customer's garlic oysters arrived without garlic; the restaurant said the order was for ordinary oysters. Seventy-four volunteer users, called a 'kangaroo jury' after the service's mascot, weighed a photo and the original order, and a slim majority backed the customer, who got a refund.

WIRED says Meituan's jurors resolved 500 to 700 cases a day in 2021 across services including shopping, a Yelp-like review site, ride-hailing and bike shares. In another case a jury sided with a restaurant that a user had reviewed badly, and the post was removed.

The idea built on earlier systems. Taobao introduced a user jury of 31 unpaid, verified volunteers in 2012; the Xianyu secondhand marketplace still uses 17 anonymous jurors and, per Alibaba research, resolves 95% of disputes that way. WeChat used peer review from 2018 against 'article laundering', removing a copy if at least 70% of panelists agree.

Petty disputes cost more to adjudicate than they are worth, so volunteers absorb the work.

Users trust a verdict from peers who have bought and sold on the same platform.

Evidence is already inside the app (orders, photos), so jurors can decide quickly and remotely.

Settling quickly protects the buyer's willingness to use the service again.

For high-volume, low-stakes disputes, crowd jurors can give a fast, accepted verdict that a company's own support team or a court would struggle to supply.

WIRED reports the system still ran at scale in 2021. Alibaba says Taobao later stopped using its jury for user disputes in favour of customer service, but the Xianyu version persists. The article also says regulation has since caught up with such platform-run systems.