Crying Wolf and a Knowing Wink: A Behavioral Study of Order Inflation and Discounting in Supply Chains
通过实地案例和眼动实验，研究供应链中买方夸大需求（狼来了）和双方默契忽略旧订单（心照不宣）的行为，发现仅改善供应商行为无效，需同时教育买方才能提升绩效。
Two field case studies uncover information discounting in supply chains, which manifests in the form of schedule padding and order inflation. Buyers often exaggerate the urgency and quantity of their needs (“crying wolf”). However, both buyers and suppliers eliminate old, inflated orders from their behavioral ordering/supply system implicitly (“knowing wink”) even though they exist in the hyper‐rational ordering system represented by the ERP system. This behavior results in (and from) low credibility of information exchanged between the buyers and suppliers and their subsequent actions, and settles in a suboptimal equilibrium. Eye tracking experiments based on these case studies unpack the psychophysiological mechanisms behind this behavior, specifically, how decision makers consider past UnFilled Orders under different experimental conditions. We find that merely improving the supplier behavior does not help: information discounting reduces only when we sensitize the buyer to the improvement in the supplier behavior. However, this comes with no financial performance improvements; performance improves by further educating the buyers of the optimal target inventory.