Traditional theories of airline pricing maintain that fares monotonically increase as fewer seats remain available on a flight. This then implies a monotonically increasing temporal profile of fares. In this paper, we exploit the presence of drops in offered fares over time as an indicator of an active yield management intervention by two main European Low-Cost Carriers, and measure its effectiveness. We find that reduction of the offered airfare by one standard deviation raises a flight's load factor on average by 2.7 percent, a measure unaffected by the intensity of competition in a route. Furthermore, yield management interventions are less effective the higher the share of leisure (holiday and visiting friends relatives) traffic on the route. This result runs counter to the common perception of leisure passengers being more responsive to price changes.
This paper applies the dynamic panel data generalized method of moments estimator to the data on commercial passenger air traffic at all primary airports in the United States to evaluate the impact of traffic volume and number of destinations served with non-stop flights on the key indicators of regional economic development. We find that number of destinations served with non-stop flights has a much clearer and more robust impact on level of employment, number of business establishments, and average wage in the region. Passenger traffic volume affects employment and average wage, but not number of establishments. At the sample median, connecting a metropolitan statistical area with an extra destination, keeping everything else constant, creates 98 jobs and facilitates the opening of four new business establishments that employ people. The corresponding numbers for the sample mean are 223 jobs and 15 businesses. The impact of air travel on regional economic development is influenced by competition on the respective airline markets.
This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between frequency of scheduled transportation services and their substitutability with personal transportation (using distance as a proxy). We study the interaction between a monopoly …rm providing a high-speed scheduled service and private transportation (i.e., car). Interestingly, the carrier chooses to increase the frequency of service on longer routes when competing with personal transportation because by providing higher frequency (at extra cost) it can also charge higher fares which can boost its pro…ts.However, in line with the results of earlier studies, frequency decreases for longer ‡ights when driving is not a viable option. An empirical application of our analysis to the European airline industry con…rms the predictions of our theoretical model.
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