An introduction to behavioral
operations management

by Dr. Philippe van de Calseyde 
Date to be announced

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. The goal of this talk is to introduce this field by discussing the results of a research project that we recently initiated in the field of sales forecasting.