ABSTRACT Existing research highlights that proactive communication of logistics service failures can positively affect consumer attitudes and behaviors. However, we explore how strategic restraint (i.e., doing less ) during service failures can serve as a powerful design principle for improving performance, highlighting the need to reconsider when and how firms intervene in such situations. Grounded in attribution theory, this study uses two scenario‐based experiments to explore the role of proactive communication in shaping consumers' attributions of blame and subsequent repurchase intentions. Findings indicate that in a logistics service context, when retailers refrain from communicating delivery delays with consumers directly (i.e., proceed with no delay communication or allow carriers to manage delay‐related communication), consumers place less blame on the retailer and increase repurchase intentions. These results hold across varying levels of service criticality and prior patronage.

Purpose - This paper aims to introduce the concept of consumer impatience, empirically explore how it relates to time-based logistics performance (delivery speed and delivery timeliness) and discuss its impact on consumer satisfaction. This research argues that gaining insights related to delivery performance from a consumer's perspective can help the development of more effective time-based logistics strategies for e-commerce home deliveries. Design/methodology/approach - Hypotheses in this study are developed using attribution theory and tested with empirical data collected through an online behavioral consumer experiment. Middle-range theorizing is used to develop an understanding of the mechanisms that impact the relationship between time-based logistics performance and consumer satisfaction. Findings - Findings indicate that consumer impatience with delivery speed and delivery timeliness play an essential role in the relationship between time-based delivery performance and consumer satisfaction. Issues with delivery timeliness are shown to have a more negative impact on consumer satisfaction than issues with delivery speed, while delivery communication is demonstrated to have a positive relationship with consumer satisfaction. Originality/value - This empirical study adds to existing time-based competition literature by taking a consumer-centric perspective and bringing a largely overlooked but critical concept - consumer impatience - into the logistics and supply chain management setting. Middle-range theorizing allows for a conceptualized understanding of consumers' delivery experiences that can help companies develop proactive actions in their time-based competition initiatives.

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to highlight the significance of advancing research methodologies in logistics, operations and supply chain management. It seeks to expand the scope of research questions and explore areas previously constrained by traditional methodological approaches, thereby enhancing the exploration of complex, real-world business issues.Design/methodology/approachThis commentary introduces and discusses the special issue on "Advances in Research Methodologies for Logistics and Supply Chain Management," exploring methodological innovations, diversity and their potential to address complex business and disciplinary challenges. The commentary assesses a broad spectrum of methodologies, ranging from traditional qualitative and quantitative approaches to overlooked methods such as qualitative comparative analysis, netnography, design science, Bayesian networks, machine learning and repertory grid technique. This diverse methodological approach enables a comprehensive examination of emerging and ongoing challenges in the supply chain. In the final summary section, we highlight additional areas of research method innovation not covered in this special issue, offering a broader perspective on future directions for methodological advancements in SCM research.FindingsThe findings suggest that integrating less explored methodologies from various disciplines encourages a richer, multi-level analysis of the supply chain management landscape. This integration facilitates a deeper understanding of emerging challenges, such as geopolitical issues, global supply chain disruptions and the integration of new technologies. Additionally, the exploration of 'white space' in research methodologies indicates significant potential for discovering new insights that bridge practical problems with theoretical contributions.Originality/valueThe value of this methodological diversity extends beyond academic enrichment. It catalyzes the generation of innovative insights crucial for business practitioners, policymakers, consultants and academics. By adopting varied research designs and methodologies, the research note can offer a broader spectrum of analytical perspectives, crucial for uncovering nuanced insights into complex, cross-cultural and relationship-based dynamics in supply chain research.

Purpose The lean and global character of supply networks today opens supply chains to potential disruptions, especially in volatile environments. Most disruptions are of relatively low potential impact; however, firms also occasionally face high-impact disruptions that may even threaten survival. This study applies and extends absorptive capacity concepts to organize resilience capabilities identified in the literature and to examine whether capabilities that provide low-impact resilience are different from those that provide high-impact resilience. A second and related objective is to evaluate whether low-impact resilience supports high-impact resilience through “learning by experience.” Design/methodology/approach Survey and industry data are used to understand capabilities involved with achieving both low-impact resilience and high-impact resilience. Findings The results of our analysis of survey and industry data uncover significant complex interactions in the effects of capabilities and volatility on resilience; suggesting that different absorptive capacity capabilities are related to low-impact resilience and high-impact resilience, respectively, and these effects depend on industry context. Moderating influences of exploitation capability and environmental volatility are consistent with a “learning by experience” explanation of the association of low-impact resilience to high-impact resilience. Originality/value This study thus provides a unifying framework with which to consider resiliency capabilities. Further, it answers a question raised in prior research, and it extends our understanding of important relationships between capabilities for different levels of resilience.

As consumer shopping preferences shift from traditional retail channels toward e-commerce, the negative effects of e-commerce are easy to see and are often noted in the popular press. Yet, the benefits of this shift are often unseen. In this article, we first consider empirical evidence that suggests technological innovation is generally a net positive for society. We look at the unseen benefits along with each of the seen costs of e-commerce growth to fully understand the impacts on society. To do this, we consider packaging and waste, traffic and emissions, and energy and resource consumption—all considered costs of e-commerce. Based on this evidence, we propose that policymakers should exercise caution before developing policies that may alter this shift and limit innovation.

For the execution of many supply chain operations tasks, firms are increasingly engaging in crowdsourcing—the act of dynamically delegating work via digital channels to for‐hire individuals intermittently available in the marketplace (also called “the crowd”). The success of this practice hinges on the ability to efficiently attract workers who produce quality work from among the crowd. We draw on the foundations of Self‐Determination Theory and the heuristic‐systematic model to examine the ways that variations in messages presented to crowdsourced agents can serve as a mechanism to enhance participation and associated performance outcomes. Data from a field experiment involving a retail inventory audit task reveal that messages appealing to the crowd's consumer identity, as opposed to crowdsourcing platform identification or firm identification, generally lead to superior performance outcomes, particularly shorter reservation time, higher task quality approval, and post‐task satisfaction. However, these effects are contingent on the valence of the message frame and the nature of the task. These findings shed light on elements critical to the successful utilization of this new type of crowdsourced “employment” in supply chain and operations tasks and suggest the careful crafting of crowdsourced task messages as a low‐cost way for managers to improve task performance outcomes.

Purpose The success of a supply chain is highly reliant on effective inventory and ordering decisions. This paper systematically reviews and analyzes the literature on inventory ordering decisions conducted using behavioral experiments to inform the state-of-the-art. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents the first systematic review of this literature. We systematically identify a body of 101 papers from an initial pool of over 12,000. Findings Extant literature and industry observations posit that decision makers often deviate from optimal ordering behavior prescribed by the quantitative models. Such deviations are often accompanied by excessive inventory costs and/or lost sales. Understanding how humans make inventory decisions is paramount to minimize the associated consequences. To address this, the field of behavioral operations management has produced a rich body of research on inventory decision-making using behavioral experiments. Our analysis identifies primary research clusters, summarizes key learnings and highlights opportunities for future research in this critical decision-making area. Practical implications The findings will have a significant impact on future research on behavioral inventory ordering decisions while informing practitioners to reach better ordering decisions. Originality/value Previous systematic reviews have explored behavioral operations broadly or its subdisciplines such as judgmental forecasting. This paper presents a systematic review that specifically investigates the state-of-the-art of inventory ordering decisions using behavioral experiments.

The provision of outstanding delivery service is increasingly critical for retailers engaged in e-commerce. As a result, many are interested in switching from their existing carrier to one that is more highly capable in order to better serve their customers. In making this switch, the retailer faces a dilemma: Better carriers cost more, so they will either have to accept a reduction in profit or increase the shipping charge to their customers. While research shows that shoppers recognize certain carriers as superior-and both theory and empirical evidence suggest that people are willing to accept certain cost-justified increases to what they are charged in a transaction-studies also show that online shoppers loathe shipping charges. Thus, what is an e-retailer to do? Through a series of vignette experiments, we examine the question of how online shoppers respond to a shipping charge increase when the retailer switches to a more highly perceived delivery carrier. Our findings show that shoppers are not particularly accepting of the switch, and while they are not likely to complain, resulting purchase intentions are notably low. Alternative strategies for implementing the carrier switch are also explored.

The risk created by government policymaking can be daunting, but little is known about the extent to which this risk is disruptive to business in general and to supply chain operations in particular. Because government is a powerful and omnipresent entity, scholars and executives alike could benefit from greater understanding of how firms react to risk emanating from the policymaking process. To help address this gap, we use resource dependence theory to develop hypotheses concerning the accumulation of inventory by firms to buffer against their exposure to potential policy changes and how such a link might be moderated by macro-level and industry-level factors. Data from 19,634 firm-year observations reveal that firms accumulate more inventory as a buffer against policy risk under conditions of high policy uncertainty and high industry dynamism. Overall, our findings support the predictions of resource dependence theory and refine understanding of supply chain responses to macro-level uncertainty by demonstrating the contingent influence of government policy. In doing so, our study provides a foundation for future research to explore the intersections between government actions and supply chain activities and offers insights for managers and policymakers about how to factor government into their decision calculi.

Public policy and associated governmental regulatory issues play critical roles in shaping the practice of supply chain management (SCM). To date, however, these issues remain largely unexplored by SCM researchers. This article makes the case that such issues are highly relevant to the field of SCM, and that SCM researchers are uniquely positioned to speak to the issues by virtue of the foundational principles and levels of analysis that define our discipline. The discussion provides suggestions and examples of how fruitful research might be conducted in this space.

Suppliers of consumer packaged goods are facing an increasingly challenging situation as they work to fulfill orders from their retail partners' distribution facilities. Traditionally these suppliers have generated forecasts of a given retailer's orders using records of that retailer's past orders. However, it is becoming increasingly common for retail firms to collect and share large volumes of point-of-sale data, thus presenting an alternative data signal for suppliers to use in generating forecasts. A question then arises as to which data produces the most accurate forecasts. Compounding this question is the fact that forecasters often temporally aggregate data for consolidation or to produce forecasts in larger time buckets. Extant literature prescribes two countervailing statistical effects, information loss and variance reduction, that could play significant roles in determining the impact of temporal aggregation on forecast accuracy. Utilizing a large set of paired order and point-of-sale data, this study examines these relationships.

Recent research on decision framing has shown that (i) there are multiple types of framing effects and (ii) the context of the decision can influence framing effects. This research examines decision framing effects in inventory control contexts by questioning the assumption of procedure invariance, that preference should not be impacted by how options are presented to a supply chain manager making an inventory control decision. Study 1 uses three single‐shot decision experiments to establish that all three types of framing effects identified by Levin et al. (1998) apply in basic inventory control contexts. Results were consistent with theory in all three cases. Given this evidence that framing effects have potential to impact inventory control decisions, two laboratory experiments in Study 2 utilize multi‐period decision tasks to demonstrate that framing effects can impact performance in a dynamic inventory decision setting similar to practice. One of the experiments in Study 2 was conducted with student subjects, while the other with inventory managers from a large retail firm. Results from both experiments provide evidence that even when initial framing effects on order quantities fade, there can be longer term effects on inventory levels and performance. Furthermore, these effects are robust to education and professional experience. The findings suggest that although a manager might select appropriate inventory control metrics, prudence must be exercised in the presentation of these metrics, and that mere presentation can be used to alleviate known human biases in inventory control decisions.

As global supply chains compete in an increasingly complex and rapidly changing business environment, supply chain responsiveness has become a highly prized capability. To increase responsiveness, supply chain managers often seek information that provides greater visibility into factors affecting both demand and supply. Managers often claim, however, that they are awash in data yet lacking in valuable information. Taken together, these conditions suggest that supply chain visibility is a necessary, but insufficient capability for enabling supply chain responsiveness. Based on organizational information processing theory, we posit that a supply chain organization's internal integration competence provides complementary information processing capabilities required to yield expected responsiveness from greater supply chain visibility. An analysis of data from 206 firms strongly supports this hypothesis. For supply chain managers, these findings indicate that a strategy for achieving supply chain responsiveness requires a dual‐pronged approach that aligns increased visibility with extensive information processing capabilities from internal integration. For researchers, this study provides an initial examination of visibility as a construct, and extends a growing literature addressing integration as an information processing capability.

We investigate inventory ordering decisions when decision makers anticipated a demand shock. Decision makers anticipating an event have been shown to brace for an uncertain negative outcome by overestimating the likelihood of that event. Decision makers faced with a spike in demand may incur increased holding costs because they may brace, exhibiting a judgment bias, and consequently a decision bias by over‐ordering inventory. Three studies span conditions of uncertainty regarding the timing and magnitude of a demand shock: Employing three between‐subjects experiments, Study 1 investigates behavior when decision makers were faced with uncertainty in timing and in magnitude of demand at the most elemental level, manipulating holding and stock out costs. The three experimental tasks feature uncertainty about the magnitude of demand (Experiment 1.1), uncertainty about the timing of demand (Experiment 1.2), and uncertainty about both the magnitude and timing of demand (Experiment 1.3). Study 2 uses a dynamic, multi‐period replenishment task and a between‐subjects manipulation regarding the uncertainty of timing and magnitude of a demand shock. Study 3 also employs a multi‐period decision environment, but compares behavior under a demand shock condition with that in a condition featuring only random variability. The collective results from the three studies identify a bias toward over‐ordering in response to a demand shock, relative to the optimal orders. The between‐subjects manipulations in Study 2 points toward a possible remedy as we found that providing information concerning the timing and magnitude of a shock ameliorated the bias. The primary revelation was that decision makers had more difficulty dealing with uncertain timing than with uncertain magnitude of demand. One implication is that it is particularly critical for retailers to carefully plan and manage how they share information with upstream supply chain partners regarding when they plan to introduce store‐level promotions.

Previous experimental research demonstrates that inefficient replenishment decision making in the supply chain can be caused by specific judgment and decision biases. Based on the literature we use controlled experiments involving both student subjects and supply chain managers to test debiasing interventions that provide declarative knowledge, which is theorized to enhance the acquisition of procedural knowledge. We first investigate the effects of three debiasing components in a single-echelon setting: knowledge of bullwhip, inventory position (IP), and use of a target order-up-to quantity. Experiment 1 (N = 1,608 decisions by 67 student subjects) using a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design for the three components finds that the conceptual understanding of IP is salient for efficient replenishment decisions. We next examine the effects of the components in a simulated, multi-echelon, serial supply chain, which introduces the additional complexity of coordination risk. Experiment 2 (N = 3,072 decisions by 128 student subjects) using a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design finds that although subjects benefit from training components, there is evidence of cognitive overload with an increased quantity of information. Finally we test whether these debiasing components may be an effective training program for practicing supply chain managers who can be expected to have higher levels of procedural knowledge through experience gained in the field. Experiment 3 (N = 864 decisions by 36 supply chain managers) using a 2 × 1 design investigates the effects of an instructional training intervention which includes all three debiasing components and finds the intervention to reduce costs by 14%. We provide avenues for future research and successful practice.

PurposeCommunication between supply chain partners is critical for replenishment decision making. Decision support systems still require significant human decision making with regard to replenishment when promotions are involved. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of the sharing of information about the magnitude and timing of retail promotions on cost efficiency in the supply chain. The authors compare performance against theoretical benchmarks and draw conclusions significant to managers.Design/methodology/approachThe subjects in Study 1, 30 undergraduate students at a large, US university, completed the experiment in a single session lasting approximately 60 minutes. The experiment involved a simple, multi‐period replenishment task, played as individuals, that was somewhat like the newsvendor game. Subjects in the experiment employed in Study 2 were senior‐level members of multiple departments from a large consumer products manufacturer in the USA. Participating departments included sales, operations, and supply chain. Self‐reported questionnaires revealed that the average subject had 15 years of experience with supply chain issues and seven years of experience with replenishment. The study was conducted in a single session, lasting approximately two hours, at the corporate headquarters of the participating company. In this experiment, 76 unique subjects participated.FindingsResults from the single‐echelon study reveal the cost‐reducing effect of knowing the magnitude and timing of demand generated by a promotion. However, the poor performance, compared with the theoretical benchmarks, by respondents in the multi‐echelon study, even when the lead time per node is half that of the single‐echelon case and the subjects were experienced managers, highlights the complexity of the task that results from a lack of coordination.Practical implicationsBillions of dollars are spent on retail promotions each year. The management of the forecasting and replenishment of inventory for such promotions is difficult to automate and requires significant human decision making. The paper explores some key issues that are important in the replenishment decision‐making scenario when a promotion is involved.Originality/valueAlthough the most obvious managerial recommendation for reducing the coordination and planning problems associated with promotions is simply to communicate more, the authors' research also suggests it may not be enough to alter performance. The results suggest that while communication is helpful, coordination may represent a more serious challenge.

Purpose - This paper aims to advocate and facilitate undertaking research focused on the effects of human behaviour, judgment and decision making in logistics and supply chain management (SCM).Design/methodology/approach - In addition to providing an overview of the potential benefits of behavioural research, this paper presents two modified frameworks for identifying and addressing behavioural issues in logistics and SCM.Findings - Behavioural research can significantly advance both theory and practice in logistics and SCM. Little behavioural research appears in top logistics journals. As researchers begin to conduct more such projects, knowledge pertaining to issues of importance to logistics and SCM will be created.Originality/value - This paper highlights an important research area and a methodology, (controlled behavioural experiments), that are currently underutilized in logistics and SCM. It further presents potential research questions and suggestions for ways in which interested researchers could begin to address such issues.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of inventory management articles published in major logistics outlets, identify themes from the literature and provide future direction for inventory management research to be published in logistics journals.Design/methodology/approach - Articles published in major logistics articles, beginning in 1976, which contribute to the inventory management literature are reviewed and cataloged. The articles are segmented based on major themes extracted from the literature as well as key assumptions made by the particular inventory management model.Findings - Two major themes are found to emerge from logistics research focused on inventory management. First, logistics researchers have focused considerable attention on integrating traditional logistics decisions, such as transportation and warehousing, with inventory management decisions, using traditional inventory control models. Second, logistics researchers have more recently focused on examining inventory management through collaborative models.Originality/value - This paper catalogs the inventory management articles published in the major logistics journals, facilitates the awareness and appreciation of such work, and stands to guide future inventory management research by highlighting gaps and unexplored topics in the extant literature.