BEHAVIORAL OPERATIONS
Mission Statement
The department seeks papers that further our understanding of operations and its best practice by explicitly accounting for empirically observed influences of human behavior on operations performance and the factors behind this behavior. Factors include rationality, bounded rationality, decision biases, cognitive limitations, individual preferences, and social influences. Behavioral issues naturally arise in any operational context in which human judgment or management of human operations is critical. Behavioral influences can surface from a variety of sources including suppliers, customers, workers, and managers. Possible contexts include but are not limited to manufacturing and service processes, supply chain management, procurement, revenue management, product development, human-computer interaction, and technology management.
The department is especially interested in papers that uncover behavioral regularities that are important to operations settings or provide theory for how behavioral regularities influence operations performance or study the ability of alternative institutional mechanisms or tools to improve operations performance through improved human performance. The department is open to a broad range of methodologies including laboratory experiments, field studies, system dynamics, and analytical models of human behavior. The chosen methodology should be well motivated and executed with the highest rigor. The department does not encourage submission of empirical studies relying entirely or primarily on unincentivized choice or judgment data.
The review process is dedicated to turning papers around quickly, and to limiting the number of revisions prior to a firm decision of acceptability for publication being taken. We encourage focused papers that make one solid point of general importance. Novel ideas must be supported with data and arguments that respond to the major questions raised and be able to show that remaining questions can be plausibly addressed by future research. Papers must be well written with a clear statement of their contribution to theory, practice, or institutional design.
Departmental Editors
Professor Gary Bolton
University of Texas at Dallas
gbolton@utdallas.edu
Professor Mirko Kremer
Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, Germany
m.kremer@fs.de
Senior Editors
Kay-Yut Chen, University of Texas at Arlington
Andrew M. Davis, Cornell University
Ernan Haruvy, McGill University
Kyle Hyndman, University of Texas at Dallas
Anton Ovchinnikov, Queen's University
Kenneth Schultz, Air Force Institute of Technology
Enno Siemsen, University of Wisconsin-Madison
John Sterman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Xuanming Su, University of Pennsylvania
Jordan Tong, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Yaozhong Wu, National University of Singapore
