Towers Perrin's submission was chosen from over two dozen entries representing organizations in industry and government. The seven finalists for the INFORMS® Edelman Award, all of whom were recognized by the award committee, are AT&T; British Telecommunications plc; Dana Corporation Off-Highway Systems Group; IBM; Towers Perrin; the U.S. Department of Energy; and Visteon Automotive Systems. The Edelman Award winner was IBM.
Towers Perrin - Tillinghast was honored for developing a suite of financial planning models that assist pension plans and insurance companies throughout the world. The system stimulates assets and liability decisions across a long-term planning horizon, typically 5 - 15 years. It has been under development since 1991 and is now employed in over 16 countries, most of them European and English-speaking. Towers Perrin reports that its system is the first and most extensive global investment system for actuarial studies. It possesses a number of distinguishing features as a result of a collaborative eight-year effort between a Princeton operations researcher and the Towers Perrin consulting staff.
Towers Perrin is the largest employer of actuaries in the world (850) with over 8,000 employees, offices in 69 countries, and over $1 billion in annual revenues.
The honored research is entitled "Asset and Liability Management for Pension Plans and Insurance Companies." The authors are John M. Mulvey, Princeton University; Gordon Gould, Towers Perrin, Denver; and Clive Morgan, Towers Perrin, Toronto.
The Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences recognizes outstanding work in operations research that has had a significant impact on the performance of the client organization. The award is jointly sponsored by The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and CPMS, the Practice Section of INFORMS. This is the 28th year that the prestigious competition has been held.
The judges of the 1998 Edelman competition were Russ Labe, Merrill Lynch Private Client Group, Chair; Joseph Discenza, Wagner & Associates; Howard Finkelberg, BBDO; H. Newton Garber, Garber Associates; Stephen C. Graves, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Yoshiro Ikura, Saitech; Peter V. Norden, Columbia University; Rick Rosenthal, Naval Postgraduate School; and Michael Rothkopf, Rutgers University.
All the finalist papers will be published in the January 2000 issue of the INFORMS publication Interfaces.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international scientific society with 12,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work primarily in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, the stock market, and telecommunications.