Thursday, January 10, 2019 | 10:00am-11:30am | Room 335, HSBC Business School Building

Abstract

We investigate the impact of behavioral ordering on profitability under competition. Specifically, we use controlled laboratory experiments to evaluate the differences in profits between a behavioral competitor where a human places orders, and a management science-driven competitor where orders are placed according to one of several plausible policies based on existing literature and managerial practice. Unlike the full-information game-theoretic models that assume rational decision-makers, these policies mimic practical situations by using less information and do not assume that their human competitors make fully rational decisions. Most prior literature focuses on non-competitive settings, where behaviorally-biased deviations from optimal order quantities result in small expected profit losses. The main result of our experiments is that human competitors receive a substantially lower profit than the equilibrium expected profit, while their competitors receive substantially higher profits, for a net difference several times larger than what was previously reported.