Strategic alliance as a response to the threat of entry: Evidence from airline codesharing

Strategic alliances are arrangements in which firms combine efforts and resources to jointly pursue a business objective while remaining separate entities. An example of such a practice is airline codesharing, in which allied carriers engage in the cooperative marketing of certain flights. We empirically test for the presence of competitive motives behind such alliances by identifying an incumbent airline's use of codesharing in response to the threat of future entry by a competitor. Using within-flight segment, fixed-effects regressions on panel data from 1998 to 2010, we estimate the impact of exogenous threats of entry on an airline's decision whether to codeshare with a partner on a specific segment. Estimates show that when an incumbent carrier's segment is threatened by a low-cost competitor it is approximately 25% more likely than average to be codeshared with its partner. Further tests show that this effect depends strongly upon the level of market share that the airline has on the segment in question. We interpret this as evidence of a strategic alliance being used to preemptively act in anticipation of future competition.