Results of a beer game experiment: Should a manager always behave according to the book?

A supply-chain is a series of connected stock management structures. Therefore, the structure of a supply-chain consists of many cascading inventory management problems. It is known that the optimal inventory control parameter values suggested by the literature are also valid for a supply-chain. The motivation for this study is to investigate the effect of the literature suggested optimal values of the parameters of a dynamic decision making heuristic in the presence of semi-rationally managed supply-chain echelons. We employ a soft coded version of The Beer Game as an experimental platform to carry out the study. We use a much longer time horizon than the one used in the board version of The Beer Game to prevent a potential short-term horizon effect. The results of the simulation runs carried out in this study do not support the use of the well-established decision parameter values for the echelon of concern if the other echelons’ inventories are managed suboptimally.