Anatomy of the Edelman: Measuring the World’s Best Analytics Projects

Abstract

Each year, the INFORMS Edelman Award celebrates the best and most impactful implementations of operations research, management science, and analytics. As the Edelman Award approaches its 50-year mark, we provide a history and characterization of the award’s finalists and winners. We provide some basic descriptive analytics about the participating organizations and authors, the impact of their work, and the methods they employed. We also conduct predictive analytics on finalist submissions, gauging contributors to success in establishing winning entries. We find that predicting Edelman winners a priori is extremely difficult; however, given a set of finalists, predictive models based on monetary impact could have predicted the winner over half the time in recent years, but would have had less predictive success in the early years of the competition. We suggest that, by characterizing the finalists, we can give future entrants a better picture of what it takes to compete for the Edelman Award.