An Empirical Investigation of the Competitive Effects of Domestic Airline Alliances

In this paper, we investigate empirically the effect of two recent domestic airline alliances. We find that both alliances benefited consumers - average fares fell and total traffic increased after the creation of the alliances on those city pairs affected by the alliances. We also find that these effects are found both on city pairs where the alliance created one or two new online carriers, and on city pairs where the alliance increased the service offered by one or both alliance partners. Finally, we find that the size of the fare effect of the alliance depends on the pre-alliance level of competition on a city pair with the effect being larger on those city pairs where the level of competition was relatively low.