Abstract
Despite the emerging contribution of machine automation, artificial intelligence and information systems, humans remain yet the most fragile ring of any organization. Decision support systems are widespread, supporting us to decide among uncertainties, such as weather conditions, suppliers’ performances and financial opportunities, but how humans take into account this information and, most of all, how they trust their own management knowledge is a controversial issue. This paper assesses, by means of a controlled experiment and ex post interviews, how individuals consider and use decision support systems in the context of the Newsvendor Problem. In accordance with prior research, the results show that individuals’ order quantities are pull-to-center biased. Moreover, ex post direct interviews suggest that (i) the individuals’ trust in decision support systems is not blind; (ii) individuals do not play the business game as a real task, (iii) they are biased by the type of incentive promised and (iv) they seem not skilled or trained enough. Ex post interviews shed a new light on controlled human experiments: they should be better analyzed and re-engineered.
Highlights
The topic of behavioral operations management came together with the study of complex system dynamics; the impact of human behavior in operations management became clear when Forrester (1952) proposed the Beer Game to perform a human experiment: simulating a four-level supply chain with customer demand and supply lead times uncertainties, he showed how human managers achieve higher operations costs than those which are obtained following the normative behavior, forwarding, step by step, the customer demand to the upstream supplier
Along the research path established by Forrester, the use of psychology applied to decisions introduced important insights aiming at modeling the human cognitive process, while controlled human experiments became the principal method to prove its efficacy
Chain management [3] and its impact on sustainability cannot be properly analyzed without considering how the system dynamics affect individuals and vice versa, when systematic biased management behaviors make supply chains unbalanced and lead to an increase in waste generation and resource consumption [4]. With regard to this issue, the Beer Game—due to its nature of complex systems—makes it difficult to isolate the influences on individual results that arise from cognitive biases or from other supply actors
Summary
The topic of behavioral operations management came together with the study of complex system dynamics; the impact of human behavior in operations management became clear when Forrester (1952) proposed the Beer Game to perform a human experiment: simulating a four-level supply chain with customer demand and supply lead times uncertainties, he showed how human managers achieve higher operations costs than those which are obtained following the normative behavior, forwarding, step by step, the customer demand to the upstream supplier. Chain management [3] and its impact on sustainability cannot be properly analyzed without considering how the system dynamics affect individuals and vice versa, when systematic biased management behaviors make supply chains unbalanced and lead to an increase in waste generation and resource consumption [4]. With regard to this issue, the Beer Game—due to its nature of complex systems—makes it difficult to isolate the influences on individual results that arise from cognitive biases or from other supply actors. In order to better focus on human cognitive biases, another
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