Behavioral Operations Management: a Blind Spot and a Research Program

Behavioral operations management, or simply behavioral operations (BOps), aims at understanding the decision-making of managers and at using this understanding to generate interventions that improve the operation of the supply chain. To do so, BOps imports knowledge from a number of fields such as economics, psychology and other social and behavioral sciences. We point out a blind spot in this knowledge: In BOps, the heuristics that people use are typically, although not always, viewed as a liability. The issue with this view is that it does not explain when and in what way heuristics can be an asset. We propose, as a research program for BOps, uncovering the conditions under which the heuristics that supply chain managers use are an asset, as well as the conditions under which they are a liability. We briefly discuss some research on heuristics in BOps and show how the study of quantitative models of heuristics can complement it.