AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECT OF MULTIMARKET CONTACTS ON US AIR CARRIERS' PRICING BEHAVIORS

Hideki Murakami () and Ryota Asahi ()
Additional contact information
Hideki Murakami: Graduate School of Business, Kobe University, Japan
Ryota Asahi: Graduate School of Business, Kobe University, Japan

The Singapore Economic Review (SER), 2011, vol. 56, issue 04, 593-600

Abstract: A number of empirical studies have shown that multimarket contacts facilitate collusive behaviors between full-service carriers (FSCs) in the US airline industry. This paper empirically investigates the effects of multimarket contacts on air carriers' pricing behaviors and highlights those of low-cost carriers (LCCs) and FSCs as well as those among LCCs. Simultaneous demand and price (pseudo-supply) equations are estimated to derive these impacts of multimarket contacts in the top 30 air markets in the US multimarket contacts among FSCs do lead to collusive setting of high airfares. However, the effect of multimarket contacts is lower among LCCs, and the degree depends on the number of LCCs in a market. The airfares of LCCs remain low, even though there are multimarket contacts among LCCs. These results suggest that the behaviors of LCCs are not affected by multimarket contacts.

Keywords: Multimarket contact; airline industry; LCC (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217590811004444
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:serxxx:v:56:y:2011:i:04:n:s0217590811004444

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0217590811004444

Access Statistics for this article

The Singapore Economic Review (SER) is currently edited by Euston Quah

More articles in The Singapore Economic Review (SER) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().