Task Complexity And Training Of Newsboy Decision-making Deviation Impact Study

With a series of economic phenomenon which can’t be explained by traditional inventory theory arising, people realized the limitations of traditional newsvendor model based on the assumption of "rational person" in explaining reality economic problems. An experimental study of newsvendor problem was first carried out by Schweitzer and Cachon (2000), they found that subjects’decisions systematic deviated from optimal order quantity showing "pull to center" effect and presented three kinds of heuristics which could explain the order behavior of subject. Their research causes a large number of scholars to focus on this issue as well as try to explain and debias the newsvendor order deviation. The research in decision science field points out that heuristic is a kind of "rules of thumb", which is used to simplify decision-making process when decision maker(DM) faces difficult task, the accuracy of heuristic decision strategies is highly task-contingent, the task complexity perceived by DM moderates the extent of using context-specific heuristics. Because newsvendor problem has the characteristics of complicated decision task, our study based on the theoretical achievements of decision science explored how heuristic bias affects order bias task in newsvendor problem situation through the experimental study, and analyzed the moderation effect of task complexity in DM using heuristics to make decision in order to, analyzes the influence of the deviation task complexity on DM by heuristic decision-making, and whether DM’s tendency of resorting to heuristic to make decision could be weakened by the training about heuristic bias was tested, the main conclusions are as follows.(1) Both mean anchor heuristic and minimizing ex-post inventory error heuristic have significant positive effect on subjects’order bias without training; either in high profit or low profit product situation, chasing demand heuristic has no significant positive impact on order bias.(2)The positive moderation of the task complexity on heuristic bias. Whether giving subjects’training, with the level of task complexity increased, the tendency of subjects anchoring mean order quantity and minimizing ex-post inventory error strengthened; Only in no training situation, chasing demand heuristic strengthened with the extent of task complexity increased.(3) The negative moderation of the training on heuristic bias, either under high profit or low profit product condition, the training weakened subjects’tendency of resorting to heuristics to solve problem in both high level and low level task complexity; Especially, chasing demand was not observed in subjects’order behavior after giving training. Although giving training weakened the extent of using heuristic, mean anchor heuristic and minimizing ex-post inventory error heuristic were not completely eliminated.(4) The influence of task complexity and training on the quality of decision. The mean order quantity in low level task complexity is more closer to the optimum order quantity than in high level task complexity, but in the group given training, the decision quality of low level task complexity group is not statistically significant higher than high level task complexity group; Overall, the decision quality significantly improved with training than without training, but giving training failed to improve decision quality in high level task complexity group when products at low profit.(5) The learning effect that pushing the newsvendor’s order toward optimal order quantity is observed only in low level task complexity for high profit products and high level task complexity for low profit products, order quantity is close to optimal order quantity over time, which showing the that training has positive impact on learning effect. But the positive adjusting learning effect is not found in all group by observing the adjustment of order quantity.