Airline Alliances, Antitrust Immunity, and Market Foreclosure

Volodymyr Bilotkach and Kai Hüschelrath
Additional contact information
Kai Hüschelrath: ZEW Centre for European Economic Research
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Kai Hueschelrath

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2013, vol. 95, issue 4, 1368-1385

Abstract: We examine the issue of market foreclosure by airline partnerships with antitrust immunity. Overlapping data on frequency of service and passenger volumes on nonstop transatlantic routes with information on the dynamics of airline partnerships, we find evidence consistent with the airlines operating under antitrust immunity refusing to accept connecting passengers from the outside carriers at respective hub airports. Following the antitrust immunity, airlines outside the partnership reduce their traffic to the partner airlines' hub airports by 4.1% to 11.5%. We suggest regulators should take possible market foreclosure effects into account when assessing the competitive effects of antitrust immunity for airline alliances. © 2013 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: air transportation; alliances; antitrust immunity; foreclosure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K21 L41 L93 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00308 link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Airline alliances, antitrust immunity and market foreclosure (2012)
Working Paper: Airline alliances, antitrust immunity and market foreclosure (2010)
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:tpr:restat:v:95:y:2013:i:4:p:1368-1385

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().