The Value of Advertisement Listings
http://www.ibtimes.com/ubers-new-partnership-yext-will-make-getting-certain-destinations-easiers-2424225
There exist algorithms like VSG and GSP that try to find market clearing prices in a set of “buyers” and “sellers” where sellers are advertisement slots and buyers are advertisements. When calculating prices we assume simplified situations involving clickthrough rates and intrinsic values of advertisers for each slot. While this may demonstrate the algorithms and how they might construct a market clearing set of prices or a Nash equilibrium, in the real world another very important aspect is to improve the clickthrough rates and also to improve the intrinsic value of each slot. Intuitively, the seller wants to increase the clickthrough rates because then buyers will value those slots higher. Buyers also want to obtain slots that will be the most effective for them to advertise to customers. One can intuit that, for example, on a Google search, a slot higher up on the page would be more valuable since it’s more easily seen. Likewise, an advertisement for a niche product or service that only appears when customers searched for a similar query is more effective in cost than a broad targeting advertisement. In this sense, the partnership of Uber and Yext attempts to increase the clickthrough rate of advertisements by showing location based advertisements. Even though customers are not directly entering search queries, simply by saying that they want to go somewhere, Uber and Yext are trying to infer indirectly what they might be interested in.