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Essays in transport economics and operations management

University of British Columbia

This dissertation studies three topics in transport economics and operations management. The first topic is on the economic regulation of congested airports. The second one is revenue sharing between airlines and airports. In the third topic, we investigate the impact of strategic customer behavior on the channel profits. Chapter 2 studies the effects of concession revenue sharing between an airport and its airlines. It is found that the degree of revenue sharing will be affected by how airlines' services are related to each other (complements, independent, or substitutes). It is further found that airport competition results in a higher degree of revenue sharing than in the case of single airports. The airport-airline chains may nevertheless derive lower profits through the revenue-sharing rivalry, and the situation is similar to a Prisoners' Dilemma. Chapter 3 considers price-cap regulation of an airport where the airport facility (e.g., its runway) is congested and air carriers have market power. In the case of airports, there are two versions of price-cap regulation: the single-till approach and the dual-till approach. We show that when airport congestion is not a major problem, single-till price-cap regulation dominates dual-till price-cap regulation with respect to social welfare. Furthermore, we identify situations where dual-till regulation performs better than single-till regulation when there is significant airport congestion. Chapter 4 investigates the impact of customer and firm discounting as well as downstream retailer competition on the benefit of decentralization when customers are strategic. We consider a dynamic two-period model consisting of one manufacturer who sells a product through multiple retailers under linear wholesale price contracts. No firm can credibly commit to future prices or quantities. With strategic customers, we find that a decentralized channel may have higher profit than that of a centralized channel. We show that in addition to the double marginalization effect, both customer and firm discounting and retailer competition are also driving factors of the higher decentralized channel profit.

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2011-04-12

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/33565

Business Administration

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/