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Information Distortion in a Supply Chain: The Bullwhip Effect
Abstract
Consider a series of companies in a supply chain, each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member. In this setting, inbound orders from a downstream member serve as a valuable informational input to upstream production and inventory decisions. This paper claims that the information transferred in the form of “orders” tends to be distorted and can misguide upstream members in their inventory and production decisions. In particular, the variance of orders may be larger than that of sales, and the distortion tends to increase as one moves upstream—a phenomenon termed “bullwhip effect.” This paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect: demand signal processing, rationing game, order batching, and price variations. Actions that can be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of this distortion are also discussed.
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Citations
Cited by
Zhu, K., & Kraemer, K. L. (2005) · Information Systems Research · doi:10.1287/isre.1050.0045 · Cited by 1,723
Zhu, K., & Kraemer, K. L. (2002) · Information Systems Research · doi:10.1287/isre.13.3.275.82 · Cited by 779
Antecedents of supply chain visibility in retail supply chains: A resource‐based theory perspective
Barratt, M., & Oke, A. (2007) · Journal of Operations Management · doi:10.1016/j.jom.2007.01.003 · Cited by 702
Pilkington, A., & Meredith, J. (2009) · Journal of Operations Management · doi:10.1016/j.jom.2008.08.001 · Cited by 537
Ecosystems: broadening the locus of value creation
Kapoor, R. (2018) · Journal of Organization Design · doi:10.1186/s41469-018-0035-4 · Cited by 504
Metadata
- Authors
- Lee, H. L., Padmanabhan, V., & Whang, S.
- Venue
- Management Science
- Published
- 1997-04
- Volume
- 43
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 546-558
- ISSN
- 0025-1909 (ISSN-L)
- 1526-5501
- OpenAlex
- W2104925392
- Cited by
- 4,698
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 78.78
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Information Distortion in a Supply Chain: The Bullwhip Effect. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1287/mnsc.43.4.546
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- Lee, H. L., Padmanabhan, V., & Whang, S. (1997). Information Distortion in a Supply Chain: The Bullwhip Effect. Management Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.43.4.546
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
