Jaime Andrés Castañeda

Future Research in Humanitarian Operations: A Behavioral Operations Perspective

Behavioral operations have established itself as a mature field of research in operations and supply chain management. Since almost all operational contexts contain people (e.g., managers, employees and customers) who are prone to decision-making errors that can negatively impact performance, behavioral operations can inform models and frameworks in operations management to account for such shortcomings. In this chapter, we explore the application of different methodological tools used in behavioral operations to study behavior in humanitarian logistics and supply chain management (HLSCM). Specifically, the chapter will explore the use of behavioral experiments, system dynamics and agent-based modeling as methodologies to understand decision making in humanitarian operations.

Transshipments in supply chains: A behavioral investigation

Abstract Behavioral operations studies in inventory management under demand uncertainty have focused on understanding decision-making processes of a single actor. However, interactions among multiple actors have received little attention, despite their importance for the creation of proper policies that improve real operations. We contribute to this literature by experimentally exploring the behavioral biases of retailers’ ordering decisions in a system composed by two symmetric retailers (newsvendors) and an automated supplier, where transshipments between retailers can be used as a strategy to improve the overall supply chain performance. This paper is the first behavioral study that evaluates whether actors coordinate their decisions through transshipment strategies. We analyze the effect of (i) different profitability conditions, (ii) communication and (iii) different behavioral best response heuristics. Results show retailers do not take advantage of transshipments to coordinate the supply chain, and although communication reduces retailers’ ordering biases, coordination does not improve. However, implementing best response heuristics that account for behavioral biases improves supply chain coordination.