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Abstract
This paper aims to observe and analyze the actual behavior of students playing the beer game which is one of the most popular games used in supply chain management class. The whole game consists of two rounds so that students experience the effect of information sharing and collaborative inventory management policies. For the analysis, 42 teams of 210 students were observed for 2 years and the game results were analyzed.
Key Words: Problem-based learning, Beer game, Bullwhip effect, Supply chain management
1. Introduction
Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-oriented pedagogical methodology in which students work with classmates to solve authentic problems proposed by an instructor so as to develop their knowledge and problem-solving skill. Even though PBL was originated from medical school, it has become popular across disciplines in higher education including business administration.[1 ] As an important tool for PBL, various games which simulate real enterprise situations have been developed.
The beer game (or the beer distribution game), which was developed by MIT in the early 1960s, is one of the most popular games used in production management and logistics management class.[2] The beer game is a role-play simulation game consists of four players including a factory, a distributor, a wholesaler and a retailer. Each player in the supply chain responds to an order from its customer and places an order to its supplier so as to minimize its total cost including inventory holding cost and inventory shortage cost. The purpose of the game is to understand student's decision pattern on the inventory management and its reaction against the unexpected events such as excessive order and shortage of supplies.[3]
Due to its popularity, various researches considering the beer game have been published. Sarkar and Chaki [4] modeled the beer game with Petri Net whereas Duggan [5] used System Dynamics model. Strozzi et al. [6] and Lee et al. [7] developed the optimal ordering policy for each player in the specific environment. Even though various researches dealt with the beer game, researches based on the observation and analysis of actual behavior of the players are hardly found. This motivated the author and the actual experiments performed in the class were analyzed in this paper.
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