From Our Friends at Olin - Building a Better Algorithm for Online Shopping Choices - ITEN

January 9, 2020 – Check out how two Washington University researchers' debate resulted in winning the Olin Award which "recognizes scholarly research that has timely, practical applications for complex business management problems". Dennis Zhang and Jake Feldman's research was focused on machine learning and customer choice modeling (respectively) to create a better algorithm for online shopping choices. In the end, they combined their approaches into a new mathematical model for presenting product choices to customers which resulted in 28% higher revenue per visit providing $22M marginal increase in a week's time for Chinese online retail giant Alibaba. Guess what, Alibaba adopted the new algorithm! Congratulations to Zhang and Feldman on your Olin Award and job well done!