Airlines as Baseball Players: Another Approach for Evaluating an Equal-Safety Hypothesis

David Czerwinski () and Arnold Barnett ()
Additional contact information
David Czerwinski: Operations Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Arnold Barnett: Operations Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Management Science, 2006, vol. 52, issue 9, 1291-1300

Abstract: Within the First World, observed differences across air carriers in passenger death risk are almost never statistically significant. But given the rarity of fatal crashes, even a lopsided split of crashes across airlines is unlikely to achieve significance. For greater perspective about relative airline safety performance, we supplemented an analysis of overall mortality data with a two-part statistical procedure. The first part--which was inspired by the way the Oakland Athletics Major League baseball team evaluates individual baseball players--allows for a sharp test of a key aspect of an equal-safety hypothesis, related to the frequency with which individual airlines suffer life-threatening events. The second test considers a further aspect of safety, namely the ability to recover from emergencies given that they have occurred. When applied to U.S. domestic jet services over 1983-2002, the test procedures indicate that long-established airlines have been about equally (and hugely) successful in protecting their passengers from accidental death and that established airlines are not demonstrably safer than the "new-entrant" jet carriers formed after U.S. airline deregulation.

Keywords: transportation air; system safety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1060.0533 (application/pdf)

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:inm:ormnsc:v:52:y:2006:i:9:p:1291-1300

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().