Behavioral operations management

Behavioral operations research (BOR) examines the behavior of actual human agents in complex decision problems. BOR is the operations management analog of experimental economics and behavioral finance, and is part of the field known as management science.

Some problems studied in behavioral operations research:

• Newsvendor problem
• Assignment problem
• Secretary problem
• Beer distribution game
• Scheduling
• Optimal maintenance
• Queueing theory

Overview

Operations research, or in other words operational research, involves a wide range of problem solving skills aiming to help organizations make more rational decisions as well as improving their efficiency. However, operations research often assume that agents involved in the process or operating system, such as employees, consumers and suppliers, makes fully rational decisions. Their decisions are not affected by their emotions and that they able to react only to relevant information while being able to discard unrelated information. However, in reality, this is not always true, human behavior has an important role in decision making and worker motivation and therefore should be considered in the study of operations. This has lead to the arisen of Behavioral operations research, it is define as the study of impacts that human behavior has on operations, design and business interactions in different organizations. Traditional operations research and behavioral operations research has a common intellectual goal, aiming to make differences in operations outcome, such as flexibility, efficiency and productivity.

Theoretical influence

It has been known for a long time that humans have some limitations in their ability to collect and react to relevant information. When a decision or conclusion has to made through complex information, human decision-makers often fail to comply with normative decision theories. Moreover, a person's lifestyle, social interaction and collective behaviors has clear influence on people's decision.

Cognitive psychology

This is a relatively new branch of psychology which focuses on the human's ability to make decisions, solve problems, learning, attention, memory and forgetting, these are only a few of the practical applications of this science.

Social psychology

People often have different reaction and behavior when they are put into different social situation, the aim of social psychology is to understand the nature and causes of individual behaviors.

Organizational Behavior

The use psychology in behavioral operations research all links to the idea of judging the relationship people's mental health and wellbeing and their behavior at work. Psychology experts often set up indicators to evaluate how the surroundings, such as working environment and noise can affect an employee in terms of their productivity at work.

Main streams of research

There are four main streams of research that can be consider as a part of behavior operations research, these research gives us an idea of the weakness of the current operations research model and the effectiveness of behavioral operations research in predicting human decisions and reactions when facing different situations..

External links

• Behavioral Dynamics in Operations Management (BDOM) Network
• Scholarpedia Entry on Behavioral Operations Management
• Behavioral Research in Operations Management 2006 (Conference)
• Harvard Behavioral Operations Conference
• Behavioural Operational Research Collaboration Platform