Location-Based Advertising in Vehicle Service Networks
- Haoran Yu, Northwestern University
- Time: 2019-04-04 15:30
- Host: Prof. Yizhou Wang
- Venue: Room 204, Courtyard No.5, Jingyuan
Abstract
Vehicle service providers can display commercial advertisements in their vehicles based on passengers' origins and destinations to create a new revenue stream. In this talk, we will consider a vehicle service provider who can generate different advertising revenues when displaying advertisements on different arcs (i.e., origin-destination pairs). The provider needs to ensure the vehicle flow balance at each location, which makes it challenging to analyze the provider's vehicle assignment and pricing decisions for different arcs. For example, the provider's price for its service on an arc depends on the advertising revenues on other arcs as well as on the arc in question. Our key idea is to show that the traffic network corresponds to an electrical network. Through leveraging properties of the electrical network, we can derive the provider's optimal vehicle assignment and pricing decisions in the presence of advertising revenues. Furthermore, we will study the provider's optimal selection of advertisers when it can only display advertisements in the network for a limited number of advertisers. We will also investigate the performance of our advertiser selection strategy based on a real-world dataset.
Biography
Haoran Yu is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. He received the Ph.D. degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2016. He was a Visiting Student in the Yale Institute for Network Science during 2015-2016. His research interests lie in the field of network economics, with the current emphasis on the mechanism designs for sharing economy, mobile advertising, and location-based services. He has published papers in top-ranked journals (e.g., IEEE TON, JSAC, and TMC) and conferences (e.g., ACM SIGMETRICS and IEEE INFOCOM) in the area of networking. His paper in IEEE INFOCOM 2016 was selected as a Best Paper Award finalist and one of top 5 papers from over 1600 submissions, and the corresponding research received press releases from several main news agencies in Hong Kong.