ABSTRACT
Analytical treatments of operations management have been applied tirelessly over the years to model operating contexts and derive theoretical “best solutions” within them. Ironically, despite noble intentions to assist managers and professionals, such efforts have systematically undermined the critical role of these decision makers through explicit and implicit assumptions in formulation (Bendoly et al. 2015). In many of these studies, managers are assumed to be perfectly rational beings, with unconstrained information processing capabilities and who are unbiased in their actions and responses. These assumptions provide the means to simplify and solve otherwise overly complex real-world problems while also unfortunately restricting the applicability and effectiveness of otherwise mathematically sophisticated research efforts.
