Orienteering for electioneering

In this paper, we introduce a combinatorial optimization problem that models the investment decision a political candidate faces when treating his or her opponents' campaign plans as given. Our formulation accounts for both the time cost of traveling between districts and the time expended while campaigning within districts. We describe a polynomial-time algorithm that computes a (2+ϵ)-approximation to the optimal solution of a discrete version of our problem by reducing the problem to another combinatorial optimization problem known as Orienteering.