Using students as subjects in experiments on decision support systems

An examination is made of the decision-making of managers and undergraduate business students for the production scheduling problem, using decision support systems (DSS). The experiment described found significant differences between undergraduate students and managers in costs, the effectiveness of their decision heuristics, and in level of erratic decision-making. These differences occurred in both the learning phase and the stable decision-making phase. It appears that in DSS research using tasks such as production scheduling, undergraduate students with little business experience differ from managers.<>