The bullwhip effect is the phenomenon of increasing demand variability in the supply chain from downstream echelons (retail) to upstream echelons (manufacturing). The objective of this study is to document the strength of the bullwhip effect in industry-level U.S. data. In particular, we say an...

Managers often engage in forecast updating with the expectation that forecast updating reduces expected shortage and inventory costs. One undesirable effect of forecast updating is that it may lead to the bullwhip effect, a phenomenon where the variability of demand increases as one moves up the...

The purpose of this paper is to examine production smoothing in supply chains. Using the controlled setting of the laboratory, we systematically investigate supply chain features that lead to production smoothing. In contrast to prior laboratory studies of the bullwhip effect, we find that the...