Airline Mitigation of Propagated Delays: Theory and Empirics on the Choice of Schedule Buffers

Jan Brueckner, Achim I. Czerny and Alberto Gaggero

No 7875, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper presents an extensive theoretical and empirical analysis of the choice of schedule buffers by airlines. With airline delays a continuing problem around the world, such an under-taking is valuable, and its lessons extend to other passenger transportation sectors. One useful lesson from the theoretical analysis of a two-flight model is that the mitigation of delay prop-agation is done entirely by the ground buffer and the second flight’s buffer. The first flight’s buffer plays no role because the ground buffer is a perfect, while nondistorting, substitute. In addition, the apportionment of mitigation responsibility between the ground buffer and the flight buffer of flight 2 is shown to depend on the relationship between the costs of ground-and flight-buffer time. The empirical results show the connection between buffer magnitudes and a host of explanatory variables, including the variability of flight times, which simulations of the model identify as an important determining factor.

Keywords: flight delays; delay propagation; buffers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L93 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ore and nep-tre
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Airline mitigation of propagated delays via schedule buffers: Theory and empirics (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7875

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