Decisions in hierarchical production planning: Goals, heuristics and bias

An experiment emulates a hierarchical production planning environment with the aim to determine the effect of goal setting on the production scheduler's performance with regard to lot sizing costs. Some heuristics and biases influencing the production scheduler's decision-making were detected. Reiterative behavioral patterns and the use of statistical parametric procedures found that goal setting reduces the production scheduler's cost dispersion, making the results more predictable, but there's no influence on performance. Production schedulers often use representativeness and availability heuristics and, the more frequent biases affecting the production scheduler's decision-making process are related to subjective probability setting and loss aversion.