Optimal personalized advertisement for virtual reality environments

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1615040 (Table of Contents)

Advertisements can be everywhere, even in the virtual environments such as social networks, digital games and applications of smart phones. The virtual places have changed the advertisement world rapidly in recent years. Advertisements are called personalized when they are in those places different from conventional ones. Innovative companies have started to notice opportunities of advertising in the virtual places. The owner of the virtual environments can display different advertisements to their users based on the specifications demanded by their advertisers, which is a significant advantage of advertising in virtual places over conventional ones. Though personalized advertisement has ensured substantial advantages to the companies, it has also brought some problems to the owners of the places. Assigning advertisements to proper users in accordance with the contract between companies and the owner of the places is a noteworthy problem for the owners to earn the maximum income from advertisements. This study applies three different approaches to assign advertisements to the proper users. The first approach is a direct application of value iteration based dynamic programming to assign advertisements to the users. It is the main skeleton of assigning system. Second one is a finite difference approach which is constructed on the first approach with notable changes. Third one covers four different heuristics for the assignment transaction. The performance of these approaches are also compared in this study. The most effective one was selected for each different case and also for all situations. Thus the model may be suggested to owners of virtual places to maximize their incomes from advertisements.