With Zuzka Brokešová, we talked about a new paper she co-authored and published in the prestigious journal Manufacturing and Service Operations Management. Her co-authors include Janka Péliová (Professor at the Department of Finance) and Carry Deck (University of Alabama). In the interview, you will learn why even experienced managers make errors when ordering inventory, what the “pull-to-center effect” is, and how high-quality feedback and intensive learning can significantly improve decision-making. Zuzka also shares what the demanding publication process looked like and why it’s worth persevering in the pursuit of high-quality academic work.
Your latest research focuses on managerial decision-making in inventory management. Tell us more about your work.
Every manager who decides how much product to order faces the same problem—estimating demand, which is always uncertain. In our research, we focused on this so-called newsvendor problem, a classic topic in inventory management. We examined why people—even those with experience—often make systematic errors that lead to suboptimal orders. To understand this, we created a unique experimental setting in which participants made decisions in nearly continuous time and received feedback about actual customer demand every half-second. This intensive environment allowed us to observe how decision quality evolves with growing experience.
In the article, you work with a concept that I’ve taken the liberty to translate as the “pull-to-center effect.” As a layperson, this seemed to me like a key idea in your work. What makes this effect interesting, and why is it important to understand how it arises—or how to think about it?
Imagine you own an ice cream stand and have to decide in the morning how much ice cream to prepare. If you prepare too little, you lose customers; too much, and the rest will spoil. While there’s an “optimal” amount, people tend to intuitively lean toward the average demand—the center. That’s the pull-to-center effect. It may sound harmless, but this mistake can cost companies a lot of money. Interestingly, this effect persists even among those with formal education or managerial experience. Our study shows that only truly extensive and intensive experience with feedback—not just theoretical training or passive observation—can significantly reduce this error.
In a recent conversation with Matej Lorko (link to interview), we talked about experiments in social sciences in general. Your study uses so-called “near-continuous time.” What does that mean, and what are its advantages over traditional experiments?
Traditional experiments in social sciences typically proceed in a step-by-step manner: you make a decision, wait for the outcome, and then proceed. We asked ourselves—what if we sped this up? In our experiment, participants didn’t have to wait—their decision would automatically repeat every half-second until they changed it. This allowed them to “live through” hundreds or even thousands of scenarios within just a few minutes. This approach enabled them to quickly test, learn from mistakes, and improve. And it gave us a unique opportunity to observe how experience translates into better decision-making in real time.
If I could take away one key insight from your paper, what would it be—and why?
Even though decision-making may seem like a matter of intuition or talent, it turns out that experience—but not just any experience—makes a crucial difference. If people are given sufficient space to “try out” the consequences of their decisions in a large number of cases, they learn to make better choices. And this doesn’t just apply to inventory—it likely holds for other types of managerial decision-making as well. In short: with quality feedback and opportunities to experiment, optimal decision-making can be trained.
Zuzka, your article was published in a leading journal in management science. What did the publication process look like—from the first submission to final acceptance—and what did you find the most challenging?
It took more than three years. From the initial submission to final acceptance, we went through five rounds of peer review. Each round brought new challenges: adding new experiments, more analysis, and expanding the discussion. The reviewers were demanding but fair—and each of their suggestions helped push the paper forward. The biggest challenge was maintaining perspective and energy through multiple rounds of rewriting. But it was worth it—the result is a study that made it into a top-tier journal and, I hope, will inspire other researchers.
