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Journal of Political Economy Vol. 129 No. 11 2021

Market Structure and Competition in Airline Markets

Federico Ciliberto1; Charles Murry2,3; Elie Tamer4

1 University of Virginia · 2 Boston College · 3 Pennsylvania State University · 4 Harvard University Press

Abstract

We provide an econometric framework for estimating a game of simultaneous entry and pricing decisions while allowing for correlations between unobserved cost and demand shocks. We use our framework to account for selection in the pricing stage. We estimate the model using data from the US airline industry and find that not accounting for endogenous entry leads to biased estimation of demand elasticities. We simulate a merger between American and US Airways and find that product repositioning and postmerger outcomes depend on how we model the characteristics of the merged firm as a function of the premerger firms’ characteristics.

DOI
10.1086/715848
Volume
129
Issue
11
Pages
2995-3038
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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