Airlines, Airports and Antitrust: A Proposed Strategy for Enhanced Competition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prior to deregulation, the consensus among many economists was that removal of governmental barriers to entry and pricing for airlines would result in a healthy competitive environment, one perhaps approaching that of perfect competition. Destructive competition, whose purported existence gave birth to regulation of these two industries in the 1930s, was deemed unlikely to occur. It was predicted that concentration was highly unlikely, for new entry would keep the industry hotly competitive.Transportation, however, has turned out not to be the ideal model of perfect competition that many proponents of deregulation insisted it was. There appear to be significant economies of scale, scope and density, and economic barriers to entry in the airline industry. Widespread bankruptcies and mergers have reduced the number of competitors to the point that major oligopolies now exist. Large airlines now dominate the infrastructure of airports, their gates and landing slots, as well as computer reservations systems.The theory of contestable markets served as a major intellectual justification for deregulation. The theory posits that if a monopolist or oligopolist begins to earn supracompetitive profits, new competitive entry, or the threat thereof, will restore pricing competition. If incumbents raise rates above competitive levels, new entrants would be attracted like sharks to the smell of blood. The theory is premised upon the belief that economic barriers to entry and economies of scale in the airline industry are relatively modest. Even the threat of entry would be sufficient to discipline the market and restore the competitive equilibrium.Contestability has not served as a significant competitive catalyst in the deregulated airline industry, and has since been abandoned by the Justice Department, which now regulates airline mergers. Because of formidable barriers to entry, many airlines are now able to exert market power in the markets which they dominate. With the creation of frequent flyer programs, travel agent commission overrides, and megacarrier dominance in fortress hubs and computer reservations systems, the entry of new carriers is highly unlikely today. In a situation where market power exists, prices rise and the level of service can deteriorate; excessive wealth is transferred from consumers to producers, and society's resources are misallocated. As consumers purchase alternative products or services it costs society more to produce.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".