After The Recent US Airline Mergers, Did Domestic Airfares Increase?

Samuel D. Barrows
Additional contact information
Samuel D. Barrows: Senior Lecturer at STEM Business School, Turan University, Kazakhstan and Doctorate of Business Administration Candidate, Toulouse Business School, France.

International Review of Management and Marketing, 2018, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: The dynamics of the US domestic airfares are studied between 2002 and 2016. During this time frame, there was significant airline industry consolidations resulting in additional market concentration in the top four airlines and in the industry as a whole. The potential airfare increase resulting from this higher concentration is evaluated on both real and inflation adjusted bases through two cases. An analysis of load factors and passenger miles and their link with the airfare increases are also evaluated through two additional cases. A breakdown of all origin hubs in the US network is included which shows a vastly different airfare increase picture in the top twenty major hubs as compared to the smaller origins. Having healthy competition usually results in lower fares and this analysis confirms that dynamic. There are discussions on industry concentration, industry profitability, pricing power, and other items which can impact airfares.

Keywords: Airline industry mergers; airfares increase; market power concentration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G34 L93 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econjournals.com/index.php/irmm/article/download/5739/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.econjournals.com/index.php/irmm/article/view/5739/pdf (text/html)

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:eco:journ3:2018-01-1

Access Statistics for this article

International Review of Management and Marketing is currently edited by Ilhan Ozturk

More articles in International Review of Management and Marketing from Econjournals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ilhan Ozturk ().