Journal of Operations Management 31 (2013) 1–5
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Journal of Operations Management
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jom
Editorial
Behavioral operations: The state of the field
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Keywords: The field of behavioral operations has matured into an established area within the discipline of operations
Behavioral operations management. The field fills an essential void by laying the micro-foundations for the broader discipline of
Review operations management. As such, the field examines a variety of topics and is methodologically diverse.
Introduction
Six years have passed since the publication of the last JOM special
issue on behavioral operations (Bendoly and Schultz, 2006). That
year also saw the first annual conference in behavioral operations.
Since then the field has developed, broadened and matured. The
annual conference has continued each year and grown. Members
of the community have organized the INFORMS Section of Behav-
ioral Operations Management and the POMS College of Behavior
in Operations Management. Doctoral courses on behavioral oper-
ations are now taught at major research institutions and special
issues in other top tier operations management journals have been
published. It is safe to say that behavioral operations has become
an accepted sub-field of the discipline of operations management.
The value of behavioral operations lies in recognizing that
almost all contexts studied within operations management contain
people. There are managers making decisions, employees working
in and improving processes, and customers buying products. It is
tempting to treat these people mechanistically – managers making
the best choices for their companies, employees diligently provid-
ing their best input and customers buying the product if the price
is below an individual threshold. But reality bites. Managers may
have the best of intentions, but are often unable to move their orga-
nization in the right direction. Employees may react to financial
incentives, but are also concerned about status and fairness. Cus-
tomers may respond not only to the value from the service or good
they purchase, but also to non-monetary aspects of the process
that delivered it. Behavioral operations starts at this micro-level to
better understand behavior – ultimately enabling operations man-
agement to make better recommendations of how to design and
improve processes and supply chains. Since the field is a departure
from a mechanistic view of the organization, it has a relentlessly
empirical focus – testing theoretical ideas for their robustness in
the laboratory and in the real world. This focus pairs well with the
Journal of Operations Management.
In addition to the stellar papers themselves, this special issue
as a collection of papers showcases several developments within
the field. Substantively, the scope of the field is broadening. Many
of the original papers in the field focused on inventory, either on
stochastic ordering policy (i.e. newsvendor) or on supply chain (i.e.
beer game) settings. The literature overview we provide in this
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introduction, as well as the papers published in the special issue,
showcase a much broader variety of topics. These include revenue
management, risk analysis and process improvement. Methodolog-
ically, while the field is often identified with experimental studies
where subjects perform tasks on a computer, the papers in this
special issue demonstrate its new directions. Our literature review
shows behavioral work that includes survey research and mathe-
matical modeling. Even within the context of experimental work,
this special issue highlights that alternative experimental methods,
such as eye movement studies or vignette-based research, are more
frequently employed.
We proceed in this introduction by briefly providing, and
explaining the definition we used to circumscribe the boundaries
of behavioral operations for this special issue. We then provide an
up-to-date view of the field by presenting the results from a lit-
erature survey. Finally, we introduce the papers published in this
special issue. We discuss both their contributions to the literature
and highlight the novel methodological approaches they bring to
the field.
1. Defining behavioral operations
Our first task when starting work on the special issue was to
decide which papers qualified as behavioral operations and which
did not. A field that cannot define its boundaries risks being every-
thing and therefore nothing. In German, the word ‘Trennschärfe’
captures our intentions best – a distinctive criterion that sharpens
the vision and focus of the field. As Bob Hayes said, “a community of
scholars, like any other community, requires a focus for its efforts,
an integrating mechanism, a common ground that all can share and
contribute to” (Hayes, 2000, pp. 106-107). With that intention, we
attempt to provide such focus.
We define behavioral operations as the study of potentially non-
hyper-rational actors in operational contexts. In the simplest sense,
behavioral operations must have an element of both operations and
behavior. These criteria, however, require a closer definition.
Research in behavioral operations requires an operations con-
text. It is the richness and complexity of the context of our discipline
that distinguishes us from research in organizational behavior. The
goal of research in behavioral operations is not, for example, a
2 Editorial / Journal of Operations Management 31 (2013) 1–5
deeper understanding of leadership, fairness, emotions or moti-
vation. We would be happy to accomplish these things, but they
are not the goal. Rather, the goal of research in behavioral oper-
ations is a deeper understanding of operations processes. Which
settings are valid contexts within the discipline of operations man-
agement is often debated. A pragmatic definition, such as Wickham
Skinners guidance that operations management is essentially what
real operations managers care about (Hayes, 2000), strikes us as
relevant and valid.
Our use of the term behavioral also requires focus. Many tra-
ditional papers in operations management do consider human
behavior. However they predominantly model humans as hyper-
rational beings optimizing behavior toward a single monetary goal.
We find value in considering other patterns of human action. There
are three criteria that characterize hyper-rational actors: (A) they
are mostly motivated by self-interest, usually expressed in mon-
etary terms; (B) they act in a conscious, deliberate manner; and
(C) they behave optimally for a specified objective function. A
paper that in principle allows a deviation from either (A), (B) or
(C) is sufficient to make a paper behavioral in nature. For exam-
ple, Urda and Loch (2013) describe behavior as being motivated by
social preferences, violating (A), and see emotions as key triggers
of behavior, violating (B). Bendoly (2013) shows that decision mak-
ers in a simple revenue management task do not behave optimally,
violating (C).
Besides research being behavioral in nature and dealing with
an operations context, a third aspect is necessary to limit the
scope of the field of behavioral operations. Research in behav-
ioral operations analyzes decisions, the behavior of individuals,
or small groups of individuals. This constrains the unit of analy-
sis to the micro-level. Separating a discipline into micro and macro
is a standard practice in many academic areas. Economics shows
this famous split between macro-economics, which is the study
of whole economies, and micro-economics, which is the study
of the parts of an economy, such as markets, organizations and
individuals. Similarly, the field of organizations is divided into
macro-organizations (i.e. organization theory), which studies the
design, structure and performance of whole organizations, and
micro-organizations (i.e. organizational behavior), which studies
the components of such organizations, such as teams and individ-
ual employees. This split enables a division of labor, and a natural
ability to theorize on different levels.
We do not mean to imply that research at the organizational
level does not add value. We merely suggest that the field of behav-
ioral operations has a different emphasis. The risk of explicitly
dividing the micro from the macro-perspective is that research
in both areas becomes divergent and does not inform each other.
There is high quality research that lives in both worlds, where
micro issues inform macro outcomes. We have included one such
paper in our special issue. Sawhney (2013) looks at the influence
of training, job rotation and motivation (micro behavior) on used
flexibility within a plant (macro operations). As the field of behav-
ioral operations matures further, we expect to see a more explicit
discussion about the distinction between micro and macro, and the
links between these levels.
2. State of the literature
We used the definition from the previous section in order to
identify papers published in behavioral operations between 2006
and 2011. We searched major outlets in operations management,
including the Journal of Operations Management (JOM), Manage-
ment Science (MS), Production and Operations Management (POM),
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (MSOM) and the
Decision Sciences Journal (DSJ) for articles matching our definition of
Fig. 1. Distribution of behavioral operations publications.
behavioral operations. The resulting literature search yielded 100
Behavioral Operations papers from 2006 to 2011. Bendoly et al.
(2006) provide a review of work prior to 2006. A list of these papers,
with operations context, methodology and behavioral domain, is
available from the authors upon request. Fig. 1 charts the frequency
of behavioral operations publications in the five journals over the
six years studied.
Fig. 1 shows a general increase in the number of papers in behav-
ioral operations. The exception to this general trend is 2008 which
saw the MSOM Special Issue in Behavioral Operations. The num-
ber of publications has recently grown within Management Science,
possibly due to the opening of new departments within that jour-
nal that focus on behavioral work. Similarly, the number of papers
published within Decision Sciences has steadily grown. JOM played a
critical role in supporting the field in its early years (’06–’08), espe-
cially by publishing the first special issue. However, as the number
of other outlets has grown the journal has recently seen a decrease
in publications in behavioral operations. We hope that this special
issue will reverse this trend, and clearly signal that JOM is open to
all forms of research in behavioral operations.
We further categorized all papers into their operations context,
as well as their methodology employed. Results from this analysis
are shown in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2 shows a large breadth of operations issues and research
methodologies. While the field of behavioral operations is often
associated with the study of inventory management and produc-
tion management (Bendoly et al., 2006), only 18% of the papers
found in our search were related to inventory and production deci-
sions. A much larger number of manuscripts dealt with supply chain
issues such as contracting or supplier relationships, product devel-
opment issues such as ideation and design decisions, or quality
issues such as error detection.
Similarly, while the field is often equated with experimental
research, less than 50% of the papers in our survey were experi-
mental, speaking to the methodological variety existing within the
field. The growth in method is especially important. Each research
methodology in itself has limitations. A mix of methodologies
allows for better triangulation of results.
The literature review also shows an explosion in the diversity of
the behavioral content. To demonstrate this we present a Wordle
based on the behavioral domains we identified during our liter-
ature review. To identify behavioral domains, we used the title,
keywords and abstracts and identified behavioral keywords men-
tioned by the authors. We were looking for theoretical perspective
used (e.g. prospect theory) or the broad domain in which their work
was positioned (e.g. social preferences). A Wordle is a graph that is
based on a frequency count of words (see http://www.wordle.net).
Words that are counted in larger frequencies are represented by a
larger font size in the graph. The resulting graph is shown in Fig. 3.
In our opinion, much of the early research identified with
behavioral operations suffered from insufficient behavioral theory
underpinnings. It focused on identifying gaps between theoretical
models of what should happen and what did happen in practice.
What theoretical grounding was used was generally restricted to a
 Editorial / Journal of Operations Management 31 (2013) 1–5
Other
Forecasting 9%
4%
Supply
Service
7% Chain
27%
Conceptual
7%
Inventory
8% Product
Dev./Proj.
Man.
Production 17%
10% Quality
11%
Fig. 2. Operations context and methodology in behavioral operations.
few areas of behavioral research such as bounded rationality and
motivation theory. The field needed more work explaining how,
why, and what could be done about these gaps (Bendoly et al.,
2010). In contrast, the behavioral domains observed in our liter-
ature review show a larger diversity of theoretical underpinnings
for understanding operations problems. Moritz et al. (2013) use
dual process theory to understand decision making. Furthermore,
Riedl et al. (2013) use procedural rationality to analyze supplier
selection while Urda and Loch (2013) use social preferences to
help understand aspects of work. While there is always room for
improvement, we have seen significant progress in the field tying
underlying theories of behavior to operations settings.
We also see an increase in the identification of individual differ-
ences (heterogeneity) in behavioral responses to similar stimuli.
An emphasis on the average response while ignoring heterogene-
ity can lead to serious errors in model development (Schultz
et al., 2007). Moritz et al. (2013) show how a tendency for cogni-
tive reflection changes inventory decisions. Vericourt et al. (2013)
show differences in inventory decisions by gender and risk pref-
erence. We strongly support a move to report and study not only
the average response of subjects, but the range and diversity of
responses as well (see also Lau et al., in press for an example).
We hope that editors and reviewers will continue to encourage the
specific inclusion of behavioral theory, from many fields, and the
analysis of heterogeneity of responses.
3. The content of this special issue
Our special issue is an excellent example of the broadening
of context, methodology and behavioral domain in our field. The
articles here show a diversity of application beyond inventory
Fig. 3. Frequency count of behavioral domains.
3
Modeling Experiment
- Other
Experiment 6%
4%
- Game
11% Experiment
- Decision
Task
28%
Archival
14%
Qualitative/
Survey
Conceptual
22%
15%
and production, a growth in behavioral domain past bounded
rationality and motivation and broadening of methodology that
complements the use of laboratory experiments.
Contextual diversity. The field of behavioral operations encom-
passes the study of individual behavior, as well as the study of social
preferences in groups (Loch and Wu, 2007). Urda and Loch (2013)
tie social preferences more clearly to individual behavior through
their study on emotions as pathways by which social preferen-
ces affect individual behavior. In their work, social preferences
trigger emotions, which in turn regulate behavior. They test
this framework in different operational contexts, such as pro-
cess improvement and shift scheduling, and discuss far-reaching
managerial implications. The concept of emotions has been under-
studied within behavioral operations, and this research provides a
powerful framework to promote more research in this area.
Given the publicity as well as the documented financial impli-
cations of supply chain risk (Hendricks and Singhal, 2005), risk
management appears as a central task for supply chain man-
agers. Two papers in our special issue examine this topic.
Hora and Klaasen (2013) examine how operational risk manage-
ment professionals assess and learn from operational risk events
that happen to other companies. They show that these profes-
sionals apply a ‘benchmarking’ logic to this process, and are more
likely to learn from companies that they see as market lead-
ers. Tazelaar and Snijders (2013), using real-life cases, show that
even experienced supply chain managers struggle with adequately
assessing risk in the first place and are easily outperformed by a
simple decision model.
One area of research that should become vital for the field
of behavioral operations is that of personnel assessment in sup-
ply chains. The field of human resources has a long tradition of
4 Editorial / Journal of Operations Management 31 (2013) 1–5
research in this area, but it is important to test which aspects of
that theory are most applicable in the context of supply chain
management. For that purpose, we need a better understanding
of individual differences in behavioral operations, an area that has
received only scant attention (Lau et al., in press). Two manuscripts
in our special issue promise to lay a better foundation for such an
understanding: Bearden et al. (2013) examine risk preferences and
gender differences; Moritz et al. (2013) study the construct of cog-
nitive reflection, i.e. the tendency of decision makers not to overly
trust their intuition. Together these papers provide a first step to
better understand the factors and traits that make for better supply
chain managers.
One of the most profound changes in supply chain management
over the last 20 years is globalization. Supply chains span the globe
in ways that were previously unimaginable. From a behavioral
perspective, culture becomes important as a predictor and explain-
ing factor of behavior in these settings (Loch and Wu, 2007). Our
special issue contains two studies that involve cross-cultural com-
parisons. Cui et al. (2013) use a simple ordering task to, explore the
differences in decision making between Chinese and U.S. managers.
Riedl et al. (2013) compare supplier selection decisions in the same
cross-cultural context.
While ordering tasks are still a frequent context for research
in behavioral operations, the field has started analyzing different
decision contexts as well. One such area is revenue management,
where a key task lies in dynamic pricing, i.e. decision makers con-
stantly judging whether to adjust prices given that capacity expires
at a certain point in the future. Bendoly (2013) studies two per-
formance metrics in this task, and finds that while both metrics
carry approximately similar information, the different framing of
these metrics has a profound influence on individual behavior, and
ultimately performance.
Methodological diversity. In addition to variation in their sub-
stantive area, the papers in this special issue are methodologically
diverse. The field of behavioral operations is often associated with
laboratory experiments (Bendoly et al., 2006). In such experiments,
participants are exposed to operational tasks, and the experi-
menters would systematically alter elements of the underlying task
or information structure. A good summary of this line of research
is given in Katok (2011). However, the field of behavioral oper-
ations is a content area, and not a methodological choice. The
articles published in the special issue demonstrate that researchers
in behavioral operations are branching out into different research
methodologies in order to more deeply understand the operations
management content.
One prominent technique is vignette-based research. In this
methodology, researchers describe a business scenario to par-
ticipants, who then respond to the scenario by either making
a choice, or by preparing a judgment on a subjective Lik-
ert scale. Manipulations involve adding, changing or deleting
sentences in the scenario description. These are often weak manip-
ulations, making results that are found more powerful. This
technique has been successfully applied in the context of con-
sumer research. Key challenges include the design of the vignettes
(Rungtusanatham et al., 2011), and selection of the proper subject
pool as respondents. Urda and Loch (2013) use student subjects
in their study on emotions, as the research context does not
require specific domain knowledge. If, however, domain specific
knowledge is required, the subject pool needs to reflect this
requirement. Hora and Klaasen (2013) draw on a pool of profes-
sional risk managers. A similar approach is also employed by
Tazelaar and Snijders (2013), who cleverly develop their vignettes
from cases they solicited using survey research.
Observed behavior in a lab provides only limited information
about the process of human judgment and decision making. One
approach to dig deeper into the psychology of such processes
is to use biometric research. This involves measuring involuntary
responses of the human body, such as eye pupil dilation or blink
rates. This approach has a long tradition in psychology and mar-
keting research, and a more recent tradition in economics as
well. With the recent use of webcams and specialized software,
these studies no longer require expensive specialized equipment.
Bendoly (2013) uses this method to examine the physiological
responses to different performance metrics in a repeated revenue
management task.
A more subjective, but much richer approach to studying the
process of human judgment and decision making lies in verbal pro-
tocol analysis which requires participants to ‘think aloud’ while
working on their task in an experiment, instead of silently mak-
ing their judgments and decisions. Common criticisms against
this approach are that people have difficulties articulating their
thought-process, or that making them do so changes the thought-
process itself. However extensive research has shown that when
following the right protocol, such criticism can be overcome
(Ericsson and Simon, 1993, see also Payne, 1994 for a short list
of best practices). Cui et al. (2013) use this approach for a cross-
cultural comparison of decision making in a simple ordering
context.
While the field of empirical operations management has a
long standing tradition in psychometric research (and the Journal
of Operations Management has been instrumental in supporting
this tradition), the field of behavioral operations has rarely made
use of these measurements. One reason may lie in the fact that
psychometric measures are out-of-task, i.e. they correspond to
responses of participants to questions that are posed separately
from the actual operations task. The behavioral economics tra-
dition (which has inspired much work in behavioral operations)
often uses in-task measures instead, i.e. key individual variables
such as risk aversion or loss aversion are estimated from observed
choices in the experiment. While in-task measures have the merit
of being based on revealed preferences, out-of-task measures are
less model dependent. Using them as correlates in the context of
experiments or surveys is a technique that will enrich the field of
behavioral operations. Bearden et al. (2013) employ psychometric
measurement to study risk aversion in a simple ordering con-
text. Moritz et al. (2013) employ a psychometric measure to study
thinking style in a similar context. Riedl et al. (2013) employ clas-
sic psychometric measurements in their survey research to study
supplier selection decisions.
4. Conclusion
The field of behavioral operations has reached a new stage
in its life, moving beyond its previous limitations on topics and
research methodologies. This special issue shows a healthy growth
in the operational contexts, research methodologies and behavioral
domains of our field. This is welcome and exciting. The inherent cre-
ativity we have seen while editing this special issue emphasize that
the field has become a vibrant and established domain within oper-
ations management, and speaks well of its future contributions.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the previous Editors in Chief, Mor-
gan Swink and Ken Boyer, for initiating the special issue, and the
current Editors in Chief, Dan Guide and Tom Choi, for their contin-
uing support. The special issue received 80 submissions; we thank
all submitting authors for their support of the special issue. Nine
of these submissions were accepted for publication in the spe-
cial issue. The average number of days between submission and
response for papers that were sent for review was 78 days. We
 Editorial / Journal of Operations Management 31 (2013) 1–5 5

thank the numerous reviewers, who allowed us to provide detailed Mark van Oyen University of Michigan
feedback and short cycle times despite the large number of submis- Liana Vittorino University of Victoria
Cynthia Wallin Brigham Young
sions received. Joseph Wang National Taiwan
Noel Watson MIT-Zaragoza
Reviewers Scott Webster Syracuse
Vishal Agarwal Georgetown Elliott Weiss University of Virginia
Gopesh Anand University of Illinois Diana Wu University of Kansas
Mark Baratt Arizona State Zhaohui Wu Oregon State
Neil Bearden INSEAD Yaozhong Wu National University of Singapore
Elliott Bendoly Emory Zach Zacharia Lehigh
Gary Bolton University of Texas at Dallas
Matt Bowler Oklahoma State
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