Results of a beer game experiment: Should a manager always behave according to the book?

We investigate the effect of the literature suggested optimal values of the parameters of a dynamic decision‐making heuristic in the presence of semirationally managed supply chain echelons using a soft coded one‐to‐one version of The Beer Game as an experimental platform. According to the counterintuitive results obtained in this study, it is possible for a “rational manager” to obtain higher costs than the costs generated by a “semirational manager.” Thus, the results do not support the use of the well‐established decision parameter values for the echelon of concern if the other echelons' inventories are managed suboptimally. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 21: 190–199, 2016