Improving behavioral decision making in operations and food safety management
Name
1082871513-MIT.pdf
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3.25 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
206949229cf198395bf1ae02ce924186
Author(s)
Wang, Shujing,
Ph. D.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Date Issued
2018
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
In Chapter 1, we design controlled laboratory experiments to investigate whether and how process-driven discussions may improve information sharing, information integration, and the resulting group performance in collective decision making. We first investigate three different conditions on group discussion and find that while suggesting a process (without enforcement) significantly enhances information sharing, enforcing the process is a critical enabler for the group to integrate the shared information into its final decision making and hence improves group performance. We then replicate our results with a more complex task in the context of operations management, and find evidence that the underlying mechanism for process to induce better performance is reduced difficulty and hence lowered mental effort involved in the task. Chapter 2 and 3 focus on supply-chain and governance measures to improve food safety management. In Chapter 2, we employ Heckman's sample selection framework to investigate whether and how structural properties of China's farming supply chains and the strength of governance within the regions in which the supply chains operate jointly influence the risks of economically motivated adulteration (EMA) of food products. We find that both supply chain dispersion and weak local governance are associated with higher EMA risks. In Chapter 3, we further explore a set of innovative transparency measures for quantifying the strength of governance in food safety, which are designed based on data scraped from relevant government websites.
Description
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Operations Research Center, 2018
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 127-138).
Subjects
Operations Research Center.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center
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