Measuring Conduct and Cost Parameters in the Spanish Airline Market

This paper examines airline competition through an empirical specification of a demand and pricing equation system. The system is estimated for the Spanish airline market using a simultaneous procedure. The suitability of the Cournot assumption is tested in a competitive scenario characterized by an asymmetric oligopoly with capacity constraints. In addition, the degree of density economies is analyzed. Results show that Spanish airlines behave in a less competitive way than is implied by the Cournot solution. Finally, some evidence on the fact that thin routes can be considered as natural monopolies is found.     

Evidence of directional price discrimination in the U.S. airline industry

This paper explores possible determinants that may affect an airline’s decision to charge passengers different roundtrip fares depending on trip origin, a case of directional price discrimination. Such fare differences cannot be the result of differences in cost, as the cost of flying a roundtrip passenger does not significantly differ depending on direction. It is argued that directional fare differences result from airlines recognizing that passenger price elasticities differ between route endpoints. A price discriminating airline will then charge a higher roundtrip fare at the endpoint where the passenger price elasticity of demand is comparatively lower. Evidence is found suggesting that airlines do use differences in income to price discriminate when setting roundtrip fares. Fares are found to be $0.18-$0.43 higher on average for each $1000 difference in average per capita income between origin and destination metro areas. This finding is sensible assuming that higher incomes reduce the price elasticity of demand for air travel, with richer passengers being less sensitive to the cost of travel.     

Airline fleet composition and deregulation

Airline responses to deregulation have been analyzed using a variety of models. This paper presents and empirically tests a model of airline behavior which explicitly treats hub-and-spoke route structures which emerged after deregulation. The change to hub-and-spoke route structure implies an alteration of airline fleet use and acquisition of aircraft after deregulation. The empirical section of this paper investigates the nature of these changes using a data panel for airlines from 1970 to 1989. The changes observed in airline fleet use and composition indicate that the primary distortion of regulation on aircraft was inhibiting their use over efficient networks.This paper has benefited from the suggestions of Kenneth Boyer, Bruce Allen, Charles Ballard, and Stephen Martin at MSU, my colleagues Djeto Assane and Bernard Malamud at UNLV, and an anonymous referee. Any errors remaining are my own.     

Price wars and price collusion in China's airline markets

In the absence of an effective antitrust law, both fare wars and price collusion have been pervasive in China's airline markets, causing concern for both airlines and consumers. A study of monthly airfare data from 2002 to 2004 confirms that fare wars occur periodically, as well as price collusion. Both tend to be short-lived. The fact that collusion is more likely to occur in January and April when demand is high, as revealed by China Eastern's and China Southern's price-war and collusion models, has been confirmed by interview information obtained from the airlines' sales managers. However, there is also evidence in these models suggesting that collusion can be more easily formed when demand is low. High airport concentration measured by the HHI may facilitate collusion in certain circumstances, but it may also lead to more price wars under other conditions. Concentration in both airports and routes does not appear to systematically affect the occurrence of fare wars and collusion in all the models estimated. We also reject the possibility that mutual forbearance due to multimarket contact plays any important anti-competitive role in China's airline markets.     

航空联盟对国际枢纽机场间机票价格的影响——以我国主要非经停国际航线为例的实证研究

本文通过构建多元回归模型,实证分析了航空联盟对我国主要非经停国际航线客运价格的影响。结果发现,在控制其他一些影响因素之后,航空联盟的存在并不一定会引起航线票价的上升。本文最后依据实证结果,给出相关对策建议。     

Does competition increase quality? Evidence from the US airline industry

This paper studies the impact of competition on quality provision in the US airline industry exploiting a novel source of exogenous variation in competition. While mergers among market incumbents may stifle competition, a merger may increase the probability of entry if the merging airlines were not operating prior to merger in the market but each of them had presence at different route endpoints. We find non-merging incumbent airlines increase their flight frequency upon entry threat and accommodate entry of the newly merged airline by lowering flight frequency upon entry. While non-merging incumbents reduced arrival delays only upon entry of the newly merged airline, we find that incumbents decrease their cancelation rates and departure delays both upon merger announcement and entry of the newly merged airline. Our evidence suggests an increase in competition may increase consumer surplus, because non-merging incumbents increase quality and convenience, while keeping their prices unchanged.     

Policy Implications of the Effects of Concentration and Multimarket Contact in China’s Airline Market

Unlike many other mergers in developed countries, which might have been assessed and their effects estimated by antitrust authorities before being granted antitrust immunity, the airline mergers that swept China’s airline industry in 2002 occurred with no antitrust challenge. These mergers provide the opportunity to study important market power issues in China’s airline markets. Given that increased concentration and multimarket contact are the main legacies of an airline merger, the effects of mergers on these variables can raise the potential for the exercise of market power. However, an examination of the period 2002–2004 during which the Chinese airline mergers occurred shows that the resulting increased concentration and enhanced multimarket contact did not have important consequences for airfares in Chinese city-pair markets. The presence of Hainan Airlines appears to have played an important role in suppressing the airfares charged by China Eastern and China Southern.     

Discounts and Public Service Obligations in the Airline Market: Lessons from Spain

We examine the impact of the universal service policy that was applied to the Spanish airline market during the period 2001?C2009. Our analysis shows that routes that benefit from price discounts that were granted by the government to island residents enjoy higher demand than the rest of the country??s domestic routes. However, the lower elasticity of demand of these routes allows airlines to set higher prices. We also find that airlines that operate inter-island routes on which their services are regulated by price caps and frequency floors charge lower prices and schedule higher flight frequencies than is the case on unregulated routes. Overall, our analysis suggests that price discounts for island residents help guarantee the profitability of routes that are regulated by public service obligations.     

Quality disclosure when firms set their own quality targets

We investigate how firms adjust their target quality levels when they - or their competitors - become subject to an information disclosure requirement. Our setting is the U.S. airline industry, where all large domestic carriers are required to report their on-time performance (OTP). OTP is measured by comparing a flight’s actual arrival time to its scheduled arrival time, which is chosen by the airline. Therefore, airlines can improve their OTP by simply increasing their scheduled flight times. We study three airlines which become subject to the disclosure requirement and find that they lengthen their schedule times by 1.4 min on average. Moreover, other airlines also increase their schedule times on routes where they compete with newly reporting airlines, by about 2.3 min, while actual flight times remain unchanged. While these numbers are small, the longer schedule times translate into a 15% improvement in OTP for previously reporting airlines. We conclude that newly reporting airlines and their direct competitors adjust their quality targets when they become subject to quality disclosure, which improves their reported quality without improving the actual time that it takes to travel from gate to gate.     

Network Structure and Airline Scheduling

This paper provides a simple analysis of the effects of network structure on the scheduling, traffic, and aircraft size choices of a monopoly airline. The analysis shows that switching to a hub-and-spoke network leads to increases in both flight frequency and aircraft size, while stimulating local traffic in and out of the hub. In addition, HS networks are shown to be preferred by the airline when travel demand is low, when flights are expensive to operate, and when passengers place a high value on flight frequency but are not excessively inconvenienced by the extra travel time required for a connecting trip. The welfare analysis shows that the flight frequency, traffic volumes, and aircraft size chosen by the monopolist are all inefficiently low under both network types. Moreover, in the most plausible case, the monopolist's network choice exhibits an inefficient bias toward the HS network, apparently reflecting an excessive desire to economize on the number of flights.     

Market structure and quality determination for complementary products: Alliances and service quality in the airline industry

This paper explores the effect of market structure on quality determination for complementary products. The focus is on the airline industry and the effect of airline alliances on flight frequency, an important element of service quality. With zero layover cost, the choice of flight frequencies has the same double-marginalization structure as in the usual alliance model, leading to a higher frequency in the alliance case as double marginalization is eliminated, along with a lower full trip price and higher traffic. The surprising result of the paper emerges with high-cost layover time, where double marginalization in frequencies is absent and where an alliance reduces service quality via a lower frequency, with the full price potentially rising (in which case traffic falls).     

Airline hubs in the Single European Market: A benchmark analysis

‘Liberalization’ of European air markets could allow the formation of airline hubs to obtain the associated economies of scope and scale. This study simulates the formation of these hubs. A model of U.S. hub location, estimated as a function of demographic and economic characteristics, is applied to European cities to identify likely hub locations. The results provide a benchmark for evaluating future airline competition in the Single European Market. However, the study is only an approximate prediction of hub location because political and structural constraints will keep the European air market from developing the competitive atmosphere found in the U.S..     

Airport deregulation: Effects on pricing and capacity

We use a model of vertical relations between two congestible airports and an airline oligopoly to examine, both analytically and numerically, how deregulation may affect airports prices and capacities. We find that: (i) unregulated profit-maximizing airports would overcharge for the congestion externality and, compared to the first-best, would induce large allocative inefficiencies and dead-weight losses. They would restrict capacity investments but, overall, would induce fewer delays; (ii) Welfare maximization subject to cost recovery performs quite well, achieving congestion levels similar to a private-unregulated airport but without inducing such large traffic contraction; this puts a question mark on the desirability of deregulation of private airports; (iii) Increased cooperation between airlines and airports provides some improvements, but the resulting airport pricing strategy leads to a downstream airline cartel; (iv) When schedule delay costs effects are strong and airline differentiation is weak, it may be optimal to have a single airline dominating the airports, but this happens only when airports' pricing schemes render the number of airlines irrelevant for competition.     

Elektroautos in einer von erneuerbaren Energien geprägten Energiewirtschaft

The German Federal Government wants to establish Germany as a leading market for electric mobility. Potential environmental benefits and changes in the economic framework conditions of the energy sector are described in this paper. In order to quantify the electricity split which is actually used for charging electric vehicles, two economic models for the energy sector, a model for the market penetration of electric vehicles, a vehicle model and an LCA model are brought together. Based on an assumed dynamic increase of electric vehicles to 12 million in 2030, an additional electricity demand of about 18 TWh is calculated. If the vehicles are charged directly after their last daily trip, the peak load increases by 12%—despite the small increase in electricity demand. First model calculations for the development of the European power generation system show that the direct impact on the construction of new power plants remains low even until 2030. An impact of electric mobility on CO₂ certificate prices can only be seen from 2025 onwards and is limited to an increase in certificate prices by a maximum of 8 % in 2030. An optimisation is possible with intelligent charging strategies: The peak load without demand side management can be reduced by 5 GW and about 600 GWh of additional wind energy can used which would otherwise have been throttled due to feed-in management—about 3.5 % of the total electricity demand of electric vehicles. On the other hand, demand side management leads to more coal power plants instead of gas power plants being used to meet the additional electricity demand. If additional renewable sources are installed along with demand side management, the electricity for electric vehicles is almost carbon free. This is also reflected in the life cycle balance of electric vehicles which also includes vehicle and battery production: With today’s average electricity split in Germany, the greenhouse gas emissions of electric vehicles are about comparable to vehicles with conventional combustion engines. However, the electricity split in 2030 or the use of additional renewable energy sources lead to a significant advantage in the greenhouse gas balance.     

Metaheuristic-based simulation optimization approach to network revenue management with an improved self-adjusting bid price function

Making accurate accept/reject decisions on dynamically arriving customer requests for different combinations of resources is a challenging task under uncertainty of competitors' pricing strategies. Because customer demand may be affected by a competitor's pricing action, changes in customer interarrival times should also be considered in capacity control procedures. In this article, a simulation model is developed for a bid price–based capacity control problem of an airline network revenue management system by considering the uncertain nature of booking cancellations and competitors' pricing strategy. An improved bid price function is proposed by considering competitors' different pricing scenarios that occur with different probabilities and their effects on the customers' demands. The classical deterministic linear program (DLP) is reformulated to determine the initial base bid prices that are utilized as control parameters in the proposed self-adjusting bid price function. Furthermore, a simulation optimization approach is applied in order to determine the appropriate values of the coefficients in the bid price function. Different evolutionary computation techniques such as differential evolution (DE), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and seeker optimization algorithm (SOA), are utilized to determine these coefficients along with comparisons. The computational experiments show that promising results can be obtained by making use of the proposed metaheuristic-based simulation optimization approach.     

Do low-quality products affect high-quality entry? Multiproduct firms and nonstop entry in airline markets

This paper studies the effect of product ownership and quality on nonstop entry in the airline industry. Specifically, this paper empirically examines the decision of an airline to offer high-quality nonstop service between cities given that the airline may or may not be offering lower quality one-stop service. I find that airlines that offer one-stop service through a hub are less likely to enter that same market with nonstop service than those that do not. In addition, the quality of the one-stop service is an important determinant of entry. Airlines are more likely to enter a market with nonstop service if their own or their rival's one-stop service in the market is of lower quality. Estimates suggest that the entry of a rival nonstop carrier diminishes the probability a carrier enters the market with nonstop service. However, airlines offering one-stop service respond differently to nonstop rivals. In particular, relative to other carriers, those offering one-stop service are more likely to enter markets if there are nonstop rivals, suggesting that cannibalization effects are diminished in the presence of nonstop competition.     

The Effects of Market Structure and Technology on Airline Fleet Composition after Deregulation

The present study examines the effects of market structure and technology on airline fleet composition in the deregulated airline industry. To capture the effects of market structure and technology on airline fleet acquisition and use, a profit function which allows airline fleet in its specification is applied to derive the fleet composition function of an airline. The results show a steady pattern in airlines' adoption of two-engine wide-bodied aircraft during the post-deregulation era, providing evidence that the airlines have responded consistently to changes in market structure and technology in acquiring two-engine wide-bodied aircraft after deregulation.     

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS IN THE MAINTENANCE,REPAIR, AND OVERHAUL INDUSTRY: AN OPTIONS APPROACH

This paper presents a practical case application of the real options framework to a multi-stage investment in the aerospace maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) industry. With the deregulated commercial airline industry and military procurement reform, the $44 billion MRO sector must implement tools to remain strategically poised. In this case study, the MRO participant values a multi-stage irreversible expenditure in maintenance equipment and processes under air travel demand uncertainty using a real options analysis. The investment scenario is viewed from a delay, growth, and compound options framework, and an appropriate sensitivity analysis is performed. The main contribution of this paper is the detailed real option framing, valuation, and discussion that may be used as an illustration for industry practitioners or classroom instruction.     

Market share and price determination in the contemporary airline industry

This paper examines airline pricing and market structure determination for domestic airport-pair routes. The model includes variables to control for the effects of congestion, consumer brand preferences, barriers to entry into airports, and multiple airport availability within a city. The results indicate the noncontestability of airline markets, but certain factors can mitigate a carrier's endpoint dominance. Additionally, the need for policies addressing airport congestion is indicated by several aspects of model results.     

Operational performance of airlines: An extension of traditional measurement paradigms

This study presents a new approach for measuring operational performance, an important facet of performance missing in the current literature concerned with international airline strategy. International performance assessments of airlines from published financial information are difficult, because (1) most airlines lease a substantial fraction of their aircraft, and (2) different accounting and taxation rules in various countries result in different impacts of leased assets on profit and balance-sheet information. A possible solution are nonfinancial data. For example, the number of available ton kilometers may reflect aircraft capacity more accurately than flight equipment depreciation. However, different units of measurement introduce new difficulties. Drawing on data from 15 airlines, this study utilizes 'Data Envelopment Analysis' as a technique to analyze and compare operational performance of airlines. The study concludes with an analysis of strategic factors of high profitability and performance in the airline industry.