2022 Daniel H. Wagner Prize Awarded to Researchers from MIT and Anheuser-Busch for Work that Results in Millions in Monthly Revenue

BALTIMORE, MD, October 18, 2022 – INFORMS, the largest association for the decision and data sciences, has awarded the 2022 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research to researchers from MIT and Anheuser-Busch InBev for their work that leverages physical retail experiments and a platform named “TestOps” to increase sales and revenue. The platforms finds that when treatment effects are small, the environment is noisy and nonstationary, and adherence problems are common, which results in roughly 100x increase of experimental power relative to alternatives. This work sees a 1%-2% increase in sales and nearly $135 million in monthly revenue. The award was presented today at the 2022 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, IN. 

The prize-winning paper, “Generalized Synthetic Control for TestOps at ABI: Models, Algorithms, and Infrastructure,” provides profound applications of analytics and O.R. to understand experimental power relative to alternatives using physical retail experiments and the platform, “TestOps.”

Congratulations to Tianyi Peng, MIT; Patricio Foncea, MIT; Luis Costa, MIT; Jingyuan (Donna) Gan, MIT; Vivek F. Farias, MIT; Ivo Rosa Montenegro, Anheuser-Busch InBev; Ayush Garg, Anheuser-Busch InBev; Dusan Popovic, Anheuser-Busch InBev; Kumarjit Pathak, Anheuser-Busch InBev.

The additional finalists for the 2022 award included:

• “AI vs. Human Buyers: A Study of Alibaba’s Inventory Replenishment System”

          Jiaxi Liu, Alibaba Group; Shuyi Lin, Alibaba Group; Linwei Xin, University of Chicago Booth School of Business; Yidong Zhang, Alibaba Group

• “Human-Centric Parcel Delivery at Deutsche Post with Operations Research and Machine Learning”

          Uğur Arıkan, Deutsche Post DHL Group; Thorsten Kranz, Deutsche Post DHL Group; Baris Cem Sal, Deutsche Post DHL Group; Severin Schmitt, Deutsche Post DHL Group; Jonas Witt, Deutsche Post            DHL Group

• “Applying Analytics to Design Lung Transplant Allocation”

          Theodore Papalexopoulos, MIT Operations Research Center; Dimitris Bertsimas, MIT Operations Research Center; Nikolaos Trichakis, MIT Operations Research Center; James Alcorn, United Network            for Organ Sharing; Rebecca Goff, United Network for Organ Sharing; Darren Stewart, NYU

2022 INFORMS Annual Meeting attendees can view all the presentations, from the winning team as well as the finalist projects, online here.