Collaborative Research: Behavioral Causes of Information Distortion in Supply Chains

合作研究：供应链中信息失真的行为原因

• 批准号: 0214337
• 负责人: Elena Katok
• 金额: $ 7.29万
• 依托单位: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2002
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2002-08-15 至 2004-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0214337&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Behavioral; Causes; Information

Managing a supply chain has been shown to be prone to systematic errors that often lead to spectacularly dysfunctional outcomes. For example, the drilling for oil and gas fluctuates three times more than the actual petroleum production, the demand for machine tools is at least twice as variable as automobile sales (the auto industry being the main consumer of machine tools), and the production of semiconductors is much more variable than industrial production as a whole (reported in Sterman 2000, pp. 666-667). This pattern of "oscillation, amplification, and phase lag," known collectively as the bullwhip effect, has been also noted in individual firms' supply chains (see Lee et al. 2000), as well as in the laboratory Sterman (1989). Sterman's results demonstrated that individuals do not act optimally even in the relatively simple laboratory setting, but significantly underweight inventory they already ordered that has not yet arrived (called the supply line). He concluded, "the key to improved performance lies within the policy individuals use to manage the system and not in the external environment. Even a perfect forecast will not prevent a manager who ignores the supply line from over ordering." (Sterman 1989, p. 336).The bullwhip effect is costly because it causes excessive inventories, poor customer service, and unnecessary capital investment. We separate explanations of the causes of the bullwhip effect into those that rely on participants' own cognitive limitations, their inability to determine the optimal way to adjust their inventory position, and those that rely on coordination, participants' beliefs about others' abilities or actions. The experiments we propose to conduct will be using both traditional supply chains with four participants and supply chains where a human participant plays one of the roles, and the other three roles are played by computerized agents programmed (and known) to act optimally. If deviations from optimal behavior are caused by an individual's cognitions, behavior should be the same in the treatments with all human subjects as with one human subject. If instead, behavior is being caused by an individual's beliefs about the decisions his supply chain partners make, behavior should be worse in treatments with all human subjects.The results from our study can have potentially broad implications on the type of decision support tools that should be included in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. If behavioral causes of the bullwhip effect are important than the recent focus on reducing operational causes provides at best an incomplete solution. The question of what information or tools can be effective in mitigating behavioral causes of the bullwhip effect has not been addressed in the literature, and it is our hope that this study will open the door to this new research agenda.

管理供应链已被证明容易出现系统性错误，而这些错误往往会导致严重的功能失调。例如，石油和天然气钻探的波动幅度是实际石油产量的三倍，对机床的需求的变化幅度至少是汽车销售的两倍（汽车工业是机床的主要消费者），半导体生产的变化幅度比整个工业生产要大得多（Sterman 2000年报告，第666-667页）。这种“振荡、放大和相位滞后”的模式，统称为牛鞭效应，也在个别公司的供应链中被注意到（见Lee et al. 2000），以及实验室Sterman（1989）。斯特曼的结果表明，即使在相对简单的实验室环境中，个体也不会做出最佳行为，但他们已经订购的尚未到达的库存（称为供应线）明显不足。他总结道：“提高性能的关键在于个人用来管理系统的策略，而不是外部环境。即使一个完美的预测也不能阻止一个忽视供应线的经理过度订购。”（Sterman 1989，第336页）。牛鞭效应是代价高昂的，因为它会导致库存过剩、客户服务差和不必要的资本投资。我们将牛鞭效应的原因解释分为两种：一种依赖于参与者自身的认知限制，即他们无法确定调整库存位置的最佳方式；另一种依赖于协调，即参与者对他人能力或行为的信念。我们建议进行的实验将使用四个参与者的传统供应链和一个人类参与者扮演其中一个角色的供应链，其他三个角色由计算机化的代理扮演，这些代理被编程（并且已知）为最佳行为。如果对最佳行为的偏离是由个体的认知引起的，那么对所有受试者的治疗行为应该与对单个受试者的治疗行为相同。相反，如果行为是由个人对其供应链合作伙伴所做决定的信念引起的，那么在对所有人类受试者的治疗中，行为应该更糟糕。我们的研究结果可能对企业资源规划（ERP）软件中应该包含的决策支持工具的类型具有潜在的广泛影响。如果牛鞭效应的行为原因很重要，那么最近对减少操作原因的关注最多只能提供一个不完整的解决方案。什么信息或工具可以有效地减轻牛鞭效应的行为原因的问题还没有在文献中得到解决，我们希望这项研究将打开这一新的研究议程的大门。