Psychological Endurance Hypothesis for Uncertain Decision and Its Application in Supply Chain Information Sharing

Abstract

This paper aims to present a new hypothesis to understand better decisions with uncertainties, and to explore as well its application in improving supply chain information sharing. From the observation that real investment decision behaviors generally imply that investors’ mental states tend to experience subtle changes with increasing the amount of investments, the psychological endurance hypothesis and the corresponding utility function are constructed. The hypothesis embraces the income-cost ratio into the set of constraints of the value of an investment, which emphasizes the decisive role of investment return rate or profit rate, and then innovatively introduces the concept of critical point of psychological endurance from which it is found that the investment behaviors demonstrate completely different characteristics on the left and right side of this critical point, and that investors’ investing willingness could be raised through exercising their psychological endurance to move outward the locations of their critical points of psychological endurance. Making further use of the hypothesis produces the shorter-board optimization model of supply chain information sharing with decision variable of the value index of information sharing. This model reveals that enterprise’s value index of information sharing has a positive relationship with the success rate of information sharing, but a negative one with the information-sharing cost elasticity of psychological vulnerability, the social risk level, and the cost of information sharing. And the model also suggests that the overall information sharing of a supply chain could be eventually achieved by ever increasing the shorter-board enterprise’s value index of information-sharing.