A Dynamic Oligopoly Game Of The Us Airline Industry

This paper studies the contribution of demand, costs, and strategic factors to the adoption of hub-and-spoke networks in the US airline industry. Our results are based on the estimation of a dynamic oligopoly game of network competition using data from the Airline Origin and Destination Survey with information on quantities, prices, and entry and exit decisions for every airline company in the routes between the 55 largest US cities. As methodological contributions of the paper, we propose and apply a method to reduce the dimension of the state space in dynamic games, and a procedure to deal with the problem of multiple equilibria when implementing counterfactual experiments. Our empirical results show that the most important factor to explain the adoption of hub-and-spoke networks is that the sunk cost of entry in a route declines importantly with the number of cities that the airline connects from the origin and destination airports of the route. For some carriers, the entry deterrence motive is the second most important factor to explain hub-and-spoke networks.

The Evolution of the US Airline Industry discusses the evolution of the hub-and-spoke network system and the associated price discrimination strategy, as the post-deregulation dominant business model of the major incumbent airlines and its breakdown in the early 2000s. It highlights the role that aircraft – as a production input – and the aircraft manufacturers' strategy have played in shaping this dominant business model in the 1990s. Fierce competition between Airbus and Boeing and plummeting new aircraft prices in the early 2000s have fueled low-cost competition of unprecedented scope, that destroyed the old business model. The impact of the manufacturers' strategy on these trends has been overlooked by industry observers, who have traditionally focused on the demand for air travel and labor costs as the most critical elements in future trends and survivability of major network airlines. The book debates the impact and merit of government regulation of the industry. It examines uncertainty, information problems, and interest group structures that have shaped environmental and safety regulations. These regulations disregard market signals and deviate from standard economic principles of social efficiency and public interest. The Evolution of the US Airline Industry also debates the applicability of traditional antitrust analysis and policies, which conflict with the complex dynamics of real-life airline competition. It questions the regulator's ability to interpret industry conduct in real time, let alone predict or change its course towards a "desirable" direction. The competitive response of the low-cost startup airlines surprised many antitrust proponents, who believed the major incumbent airlines practically blocked significant new entry. This creative market response, in fact, destroyed the major incumbents' power to discriminate pricing – a task the antitrust efforts failed to accomplish.

Continues the research of an earlier paper by Spencer and Cassell (1985) that pointed out that although U.S. airline deregulation initially spawned more competition in fares and in number of competitors, the quality of service and the returns to labour decreased. Proves the analysis, the trend towards consolidation would continue, and result in an oligopoly under which prices would stabilize and move upward, and services would become more uniform and labour would recover some wage and benefit concessions that had been made in the early days of deregulation.

The dissertation consists of two essays on different aspects of dynamic pricing with applications to the U.S. airline industry. The first essay studies how a firm's ability to price discriminate over time affects production, product quality, and product allocation among consumers. The theoretical model has forward-looking heterogeneous consumers who face a monopoly firm. I use this model to study the time paths of prices for airline tickets offered on monopoly routes in the U.S. Using estimates of the model's demand and cost parameters, I compare the welfare travelers receive under the current system to several alternative systems, including one in which free resale of airline tickets is allowed. The second essay, motivated by pricing practices in the airline industry, studies the incentives of players to publicly and independently limit the sets of actions they play later in a game. I find that to benefit from self-restraint, players have to exclude all actions that create deviations for them and keep some actions that can deter deviations of others. I develop a set of conditions under which these strategies form a subgame perfect equilibrium and show that in a Bertrand oligopoly, firms can mutually gain from self-restraint, while in a Cournot oligopoly they cannot.

This dissertation studies the effects of firm's collaborative strategy on both demand and supply, and equilibrium to derive various welfare implications. I explain both horizontal mergers and vertical relationships, focusing on the U.S. airline industry. In the first study, I address significant limitations of traditional merger simulations which have focused solely on price changes while constraining the set of product characteristics to be identical pre- and post-merger. To overcome the limitations, I endogenize both prices and product characteristics by specifying a two-stage oligopoly game. After estimating demand and supply system, I simulate the effect of the Delta and Northwest Airlines merger on prices, product characteristics, and welfare. The simulation results show that the merged firm tends to increase product differentiation post-merger, the higher product differentiation reduces the firm's incentive to raise prices, and the changes in characteristics and prices increase not only the merged firm's profit but also consumer welfare. I also compare the predicted to actual post-merger outcome and find that endogenizing product characteristics is essential to better predict the actual outcome. The second study investigates the impact of contractual agreements regarding gates between airports and carriers on major carrier's market power. Competition Plans reported by thirty one hub airports provide information on a carrier's gate-occupancy, sublease agreement, and Majority-In-Interest clauses at an airport. I estimate the effects of these contractual practices on passengers' utility and carriers' marginal costs. The main results show that a carrier's gate dominance has a positive effect on the demand side through passengers' utility, and business travelers have a higher willingness to pay for gates than tourists. On the supply side, a carrier's gate dominance decreases its own marginal cost, especially when the airport is congested. Furthermore, the existence of sublease agreement at an airport is likely to increase non-signatory carriers' marginal costs, whereas the provision of Majority-In-Interest clauses increases signatory carriers' marginal costs. Based on the estimates, I execute a counterfactual analysis and find that regulatory limits on gate occupancy can reduce the differentials in costs and profits between signatory and non-signatory airlines. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/152644

The Economics of International Airline Transport provides a complete analysis of the economics of international air transportation by presenting research on the costs borne by air transportation companies due to pollution regulation in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.