beer game
AI Playing Business Games: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Managerial Decision-Making in Dynamic Simulations
The rapid advancement of LLMs sparked significant interest in their potential to augment or automate managerial functions. One of the most recent trends in AI benchmarking is performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) over longer time horizons. While LLMs excel at tasks involving natural language and pattern recognition, their capabilities in multi-step, strategic business decision-making remain largely unexplored. Few studies demonstrated how results can be different from benchmarks in short-term tasks, as Vending-Bench revealed. Meanwhile, there is a shortage of alternative benchmarks for long-term coherence. This research analyses a novel benchmark using a business game for the decision making in business. The research contributes to the recent literature on AI by proposing a reproducible, open-access management simulator to the research community for LLM benchmarking. This novel framework is used for evaluating the performance of five leading LLMs available in free online interface: Gemini, ChatGPT, Meta AI, Mistral AI, and Grok. LLM makes decisions for a simulated retail company. A dynamic, month-by-month management simulation provides transparently in spreadsheet model as experimental environment. In each of twelve months, the LLMs are provided with a structured prompt containing a full business report from the previous period and are tasked with making key strategic decisions: pricing, order size, marketing budget, hiring, dismissal, loans, training expense, R&D expense, sales forecast, income forecast The methodology is designed to compare the LLMs on quantitative metrics: profit, revenue, and market share, and other KPIs. LLM decisions are analyzed in their strategic coherence, adaptability to market changes, and the rationale provided for their decisions. This approach allows to move beyond simple performance metrics for assessment of the long-term decision-making.
Playing the Beer Game Using Reinforcement Learning
The beer game is a widely used in-class game that is played in supply chain management classes to demonstrate a phenomenon known as the bullwhip effect. The game consists of a serial supply chain network with four players--a retailer, a wholesaler, a distributor, and a manufacturer. In each period of the game, the retailer experiences a random demand from customers. Then the four players each decide how much inventory of "beer" to order. The retailer orders from the wholesaler, the wholesaler orders from the distributor, the distributor from the manufacturer, and the manufacturer orders from an external supplier that is not a player in the game.