Analyzing Location-Based Advertising for Vehicle Service Providers Using Effective Resistances

Vehicle service providers can display commercial ads in their vehicles based on passengers' origins and destinations to create a new revenue stream. We study a vehicle service provider who can generate different ad revenues when displaying ads 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. To tackle the problem, we show that certain properties of the traffic network can be captured by a corresponding electrical network. When the effective resistance between two locations is small, there are many paths between the two locations and the provider can easily route vehicles between them. We derive the provider's optimal vehicle assignment and pricing decisions based on effective resistances.