Behavioral operations management

Human beings are critical to the functioning and performance of the majority of operating systems. However, human behavior traditionally has been ignored in the field of operation management (OM). More specifically, most models in OM assume that agents who participate in operating processes are either fully rational or can be induced to behave rationally. That is, these models assume that people have stable preferences, are not affected by cognitive biases or emotions, and have the ability to disregard irrelevant information by only responding to relevant information when making decisions.
 
The field of Behavioral Operations Management (BOM) departs from these idealized assumptions by acknowledging that human decision-makers are guided by emotions, cognitive biases or irrelevant situational cues when making decisions. As such, the goal of the current course is to give students a thorough understanding of the impact of human behavior in various operational settings. More specifically, the focus of this course is on analyzing and improving the performance of critical operational processes by using insights from the field of behavioral operations management. More specifically, insights from, among others, the fields of emotions, cognition, judgment and decision-making, trust, and leadership are combined with insights from operations management.

This course provides students with an in depth understanding of how human behavior impacts the performance of various operational processes. It is made up of a series of weekly lectures in which participants are required to actively engage in in depth discussions. For the two group assignments, we ask students to analyze how organizational planners adjust statistical sales forecasts. More specifically, in collaboration with an industry partner, students are asked to analyze thousands of forecasting decisions to uncover how human decision-making influences the quality of the sales forecast (assignment 1) in order to use this knowledge to streamline how planners should make forecast adjustments (assignment 2).

After the successful completion of the course, students should be able to:

• Develop a critical understanding of how Behavioral Operations Management (BOM) challenges classical OM assumptions .
• Explain how human behavior affects decision-making and performance in operational processes.
• Integrate insights from organizational psychology (e.g., judgment/decision-making, emotions, leadership) with operations management to analyze operational problems.
• Analyze real-world operational data (e.g., sales forecast adjustments) to diagnose how human interventions influence decision quality.
• Evaluate when and why human behavior adds value or introduces error in key operational processes.
• Develop evidence-based recommendations to improve operational decision workflows (e.g., guidelines for forecast adjustments, debiasing/process redesign).
• Produce a professional report that diagnoses a complex BOM problem and proposes concrete, data-informed solutions.
• Communicate and defend analyses and recommendations in written form and through in-depth discussion.

You must meet all the following collections of requirements

• Collection 1
• Completed Final examination Bsc program
• Collection 2
• Completed Pre-Master

• Scientific articles and book chapters. The required literature, such as academic papers, will be made available via CANVAS.