On the importance of behavioral operational research: The case of understanding and communicating about dynamic systems

Behavioural operational research: Returning to the roots of the OR profession

“…More recently within mainstream OR, examples of how behaviour can be incorporated in OR models, together with studies of how behaviour affects, or is affected by OR model-supported processes are beginning to appear (e.g. Ackermann & Eden, 2011;Amini, Wakolbinger, Racer, & Nejad, 2012;Brailsford & Schmidt, 2003;Franco, 2013;Hämäläinen et al, 2013;Morton & Fasolo, 2009;Ormerod, 2014;Rouwette, Korzilius, Vennix, & Jacobs, 2011;White, 2009). These studies encompass a wide range of topics and research methodologies that suggests a heterogeneous BOR field.…”

“…However, whilst the socially situated nature of OR in practice has long been recognised (e.g. Keys, 1997), it was not until the wave of recent activity triggered by Hämäläinen et al's (2013) paper in this journal that the role and impact of behaviour in OR practice regained centrality in academic and practitioners circles alike.…”

“…The very high number of proposals and submissions to this special issue shows that there is indeed widespread interest in this area, which only now has found a home base platform by the introduction of the term behavioural OR (BOR) (Hämäläinen et al, 2013). Events such as the 2014 IFORS and 2015 EURO conference streams on BOR, the creation of a BOR national interest group sponsored by the UK OR Society, and the launch of a BOR website portal hosted by Aalto University (bor.aalto.fi) are all a clear testimony of the revival of the BOR agenda within our community.…”

Heuristic decision making in network linking

“…As seen in Section 4.1, the consequences for payoffs in the simplest setting may not be very high, but it may very well be expected that the structural and efficiency predictions and therefore recommendations for interventions resulting from these more complex models differ largely if their agents are no longer optimizing but consider much simpler decision cues instead (cf. Hämäläinen et al, 2013). For example, the model with high link specificity by Harmsen -van Hout et al predicted a wide range of networks in situations without value transferability, including non-standard networks like highly connected and "small world" networks, and highly fragmented, efficient networks in situations with value transferability.…”

“…In the current paper, we comply with the recent call by Hämäläinen et al (2013) to explicitly consider behavioral phenomena within OR processes, as these processes are highly sensitive to behavioral effects. Accordingly, the abovementioned OR models on decentral network creation may result in opposite recommendations for optimal interventions.…”