Bullwhip Effect
Forrester Effect
A supply-chain pattern where small shifts in consumer demand cause increasingly large swings in orders at each step upstream — so that a minor change at the retail level becomes a wild overreaction by the time it reaches manufacturers.
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Origin
Jay Forrester first described the phenomenon — then called "demand amplification" — in his 1961 book Industrial Dynamics at MIT. The vivid name came later from logistics managers at Procter & Gamble, who noticed the pattern while studying baby-diaper orders. Hau Lee and colleagues then popularized the concept widely through a landmark 1997 paper in Management Science.
Updated February 22, 2026