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Whitman School hosts annual Behavioral Operations Conference June 25-27May 20, 2009Amy Schmitzaemehrin@syr.edu

The supply chain management program in the at Syracuse University hosts the fourth annual Behavioral Operations Management (BOPS) conference June 25-27 with scholars from across the globe leading discussions on economics, decision making, supply chain, managerial issues, operations and more.

The conference, spearheaded by Julie Niederhoff, assistant professor of supply chain management at the Whitman School, begins Thursday, June 25, at 1:30 p.m. with a discussion on “Dynamics.” The discussion will include presentations by Eyran Gisches, manager of the Decision Behavior Lab at the University of Arizona; Amnon Rapoport, professor of management at the University of California-Riverside; and Anton Ovchinnikov, assistant professor of business administration at the University of Virginia.

The second session, on “Learning and Stability,” begins at 3:30 p.m., and includes presentations by Ulrich Thonemann, professor of supply chain management at the University of Cologne; Candido Perez, professor at Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administracion (IESA); and Kay-Yut Chen, principal scientist in the Information Services & Process Innovation Lab at HP Labs.

The morning sessions on Friday, June 26, include “Supply Chains,” with presentations by Guido Voigt, professor of economics and management at Otto-von-Guericke University; Kyle Hyndman, assistant professor at Southern Methodist University; and John MacDonald, assistant professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University; and “Managerial Issues,” with presentations by Nitin Joglekar, associate professor of operations and technology management at Boston University; Suresh Muthulingam, assistant professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management; and Yaozhong Wu, assistant professor at National University of Singapore.

The keynote address will be given Friday at 3:30 p.m. by Jay Russo, the S.C. Johnson Family Professor of Management, Marketing and Behavioral Science at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. Russo will speak on “No Garbage In, Garbage Out: The Distortion of Information by Decision Makers.”

Russo researches decision making for managers and consumers. He is co-author of “Decision Traps” (Doubleday Business, 1989) and “Winning Decisions” (Broadway Business, 2002), which discuss the implications of decision biases for managers. He has served on the faculty at the University of Chicago and the University of California, San Diego and has held visiting positions at Bocconi University (Milan), Carnegie-Mellon University, Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Society and has consulted for a number of corporations on managerial and consumer decision making, including American Express, SmithKline Beecham, Proctor and Gamble, and General Motors Research Laboratories.

The conference concludes with a morning session on “Newsvendor Experiments,” with presentations by Yufei Ren, a graduate student at the University of Texas-Dallas; Nils Rudi, associate professor of operations and technology management at INSEAD; and Diana (Yan) Wu, assistant professor at the University of Kansas.

“The Whitman School and its venerable supply chain management program have a long history of investigating issues related to operations,” says Melvin T. Stith, dean of the Whitman School. “This is a field that, while long in academic history, remains ripe with opportunities, and we are honored to host the fourth annual conference. We are confident that such renowned thinkers convening at Whitman will only further enhance our program and the field as a whole.”

For more information about the conference, visit . For information on registration, contact Agnes Magnarelli, administrator of research centers at the Whitman School, at (315) 443-1383 or bops2009@syr.edu. Media queries can be directed to Amy Schmitz, Whitman director of communications, at (315) 443-3834 or aemehrin@syr.edu.