Behavioral 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).

Additional information tests
Practical exercise consisting of 2 (interrelated) assignments to be carried out in groups of 2-3 students. The practical exercise counts towards 60% of the overall grade (each assignment 30%).
The written exam consist of a combination of multiple choice questions and open-ended questions.

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.

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.