Behavioral Management in Supply Chains

A supply chain as a long-term form of cooperation of autonomous activities allows for an efficient value-addition process and thereby, survival in the global market. The successful management of such a value-addition chain depends on the alignment of the individual goals of its members with the systemic goals of the supply chain. This alignment is severely impaired in a number of ways: Differing interests of the cooperators, asymmetric distribution of information, and a high overall problem complexity can prevent exact problem solutions by supply chain managers, resulting in mere approximate solutions. In this book, these deficits – so-called behavioural anomalies – are described and analysed by means of behavioural experiments. A central finding of this study is that the rationality postulation often theoretically ascribed to homo oeconomicus should be viewed critically with respect to the management of supply chains.