Finalist for the 2022 RM&P Practice Prize Award

Our work done in collaboration with AAnheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) and Arena AI was selected as a finalist for the 2022 Revenue Management and Pricing Practice Award. We implemented a bandit-based active learning approach to optimize manufacturer-to-retailer promotions at AB InBev, which is a $50B+ beverage multinational.

In a real-world A/B test conducted on a single SKU and a sample of 19K stores in the Brazil market, the active learning approach outperformed existing promotions strategies obtaining 39% more profit. Our innovation lies in the use of active learning to overcome
historical data challenges and a probabilistic and batched UCB algorithm to deal with complex business environments. A working paper on this work is forthcoming.