Product Quality Effects of International Airline Alliances, Antitrust Immunity,and Domestic Mergers

摘要

Much of the literature on airline cooperation focuses on the pricerneffects of cooperation. A key contribution of our paper is to empirically examinernthe product quality effects of airline cooperation. Two common types of cooperationrnamong airlines involve international alliances and antitrust immunityrn(ATI), where ATI allows for more extensive cooperation. Additionally, this paperrnexamines the extent to which domestic mergers affect the quality of internationalrnair travel products. The results suggest that increases in the membership of arncarrier’s alliance or ATI partners and domestic mergers are associated with therncarrier’s own products having more travel-convenient routing quality. Therefore,rna complete welfare evaluation of airline cooperation and mergers should notrnignore product quality effects.