Improving behavioral decision making in operations and food safety management

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.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Wang, Shujing, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• Operations Research Center.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/120225

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/120225