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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title A hidden anchor: The influence of service levels on demand forecasts
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Behnam Fahimnia
  • Meysam Arvan
  • Tarkan Tan
  • Enno Siemsen
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Journal of Operations Management
Publisher Wiley
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 1873-1317
Volume 69
Number 5
Page Range 856 - 871
Date 2023
Abstract Text Demand planning is informed by demand forecasts, service level requirements, replenishment constraints, and revenue projections. “Demand forecasts” differ from “demand plans” in that forecasts only represent the distribution (or the most likely value) of product demand. Motivated by common forecasting practices in industry, our research examines whether forecasters recognize this difference between demand forecasts and demand plans. Based on a lab experiment informed by data from two large FMCG companies, we found that forecasters factor service levels into their demand forecasts, even when they are clearly instructed to predict the most likely demand and incentivized to minimize the forecast error. We establish that this result holds for students and practitioners alike, and show that this behavior is driven by the service level information, and not some other anchor. We use data from a recent industry survey to support the external validity of our key findings.
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Digital Object Identifier 10.1002/joom.1229
Other Identification Number merlin-id:23106
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Keywords anchor, behavior, forecasting, judgment, service level, sales and operations planning
Additional Information Lizenz: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0