The Impact of the Bullwhip Effect on Sales and Earnings Prediction Using Order Backlog
研究发现牛鞭效应削弱了上游供应商利用订单积压预测未来销售和盈利的能力，且这种影响在运营周期较长的公司中更明显，而金融分析师平均未能完全理解这一差异。
Abstract Recent work in the supply chain literature suggests that the variance in orders placed with suppliers will be larger than that of sales to buyers. This distortion in demand information increases as it is passed along the supply chain from customers to upstream suppliers and has been referred to as “the bullwhip effect.” In this paper, we argue that the bullwhip effect reduces the ability of order backlog to predict future sales and earnings for upstream suppliers. Results obtained from our empirical analysis support this proposition. We find that the impact of bullwhip on the predictive ability of order backlog is further accentuated in firms with longer operating cycles. Market intermediaries such as financial analysts, on average, are unable to fully account for differences in the predictive ability of order backlog. However, analysts belonging to employers that follow all firms in a vertical supply chain do a better job of understanding the impact of bullwhip on the predictive ability of order backlog. In additional tests, we find that the bullwhip effect also impedes the ability of inventory components to predict future sales and earnings.