Frequent flyer programs premium and the role of airport dominance

This paper estimates a Frequent Flyer Programs (FFP) price premium -- higher fares associated with a larger proportion of travelers using FFP. The results show that FFP affect the entire price distribution, but the effect is larger on lower end fares. In addition, airport dominance increases the premium on less expensive fares but has no effect on the premium associated with the right tail of the price distribution.Frequent Flyer Programs; Pricing; Airlines; Panel Data

Structural realism versus deployment realism: A comparative evaluation

In this paper I challenge and adjudicate between the two positions that have come to prominence in the scientific realism debate: deployment realism and structural realism. I discuss a set of cases from the history of celestial mechanics, including some of the most important successes in the history of science. To the surprise of the deployment realist, these are novel predictive successes toward which theoretical constituents that are now seen to be patently false were genuinely deployed. Exploring the implications for structural realism, I show that the need to accommodate these cases forces our notion of “structure” toward a dramatic depletion of logical content, threatening to render it explanatorily vacuous: the better structuralism fares against these historical examples, in terms of retention, the worse it fares in content and explanatory strength. I conclude by considering recent restrictions that serve to make “structure” more specific. I show however that these refinements will not suffice: the better structuralism fares in specificity and explanatory strength, the worse it fares against history. In light of these case studies, both deployment realism and structural realism are significantly threatened by the very historical challenge they were introduced to answer

Demand Functions for Services of Public Railway Passenger Transportation: An Empirical Analysis for Slovenia

The paper deals with the estimation of demand functions for services of public railway passenger transportation in the case of Slovenia. Six demand functions were selected and separately interpreted. The aggregate values of demand elasticities reported in this paper suggest that the railway passenger demand is price and income inelastic. Coefficients of income elasticity below unity show that the services of railway passenger transportation in Slovenia can be classified among normal goods. A hypothetical increase in average real fares leads to a percentage decrease in the number of passengers travelling by rail that is smaller than the percentage increase in fares. The estimated price elasticities imply that, in the short run, there is potential for improving revenues of the railway operator by increasing average real fares.

Josef Fares’ Zozo as accented cinema

In 2005, the Lebanese-Swedish filmmaker Josef Fares, who had attained recognition in Sweden through the immigrant comedies Jalla! Jalla! (2000) and Kopps (2003), presented his third feature film and first drama, Zozo, inspired by Fares’s own migration to Sweden. Set in 1987 Beirut, Zozo portrays a ten-year boy who loses his parents during the Lebanese Civil War and who journeys to reunite with his grandparents already settled in Sweden. In Sweden, Zozo is forced to learn the host country’s language quickly and to understand the unwritten rules of his new culture. Like his grandparents, he will probably always have an accent and be recognizably the “other.” The film became Sweden’s national submission to the 78th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and its nomination not only raised questions on what Sweden and Swedishness mean in a contemporary global world, but it also reexamined the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory in a borderless Europe. In this essay I argue that Zozo is an illustration of accented film, which means the film is neither Swedish nor Lebanese, but a combination of both. Influenced by his deterritorialization from Lebanon and his current life in Sweden, the cinematographic stylistic choices of Josef Fares exhibit a “double consciousness” - multiple cultural identities at once. To further understand the Lebanese and Swedish elements in the film, I analyze how elements such as chronotopes (time-space), border crossing, epistolarity, and double consciousness are inscribed in the film. In addition, I use Laura U. Marks’ concept of fossils, radioactive recollection-objects. By employing Hamid Naficy’s accented cinema theory, I hope to explain how Josef Fares is neither Swedish nor Lebanese, but an individual with multicultural identities, which reflect in the elements of the narrative and cinematographic style.Germanic Studie

Review of fares elasticities in Great Britain

INTRODUCTION Empirical analysis of the behavioural impact of a wide range of travel variables has been conducted extensively in Britain over the past forty years or so. With the likely exception of the value of travel time (Wardman, 2001), the most widely estimated parameters have been price elasticities of demand and in particular public transport fare elasticities. The wealth of available evidence provides an excellent opportunity to obtain greater insights into fare elasticities and their determinants. There have been numerous notable reviews of price elasticities (Ely, 1976; TRF&, 1980; Goodwin and Williams, 1985; Goodwin, 1992; Oum et al, 1992; Halcrow Fox et al., 1993; Wardman, 1997; Nijkamp et al., 1998; Pratt, 2000; De Jong and Gunn, 2001; Graham and Glaister, 2002; VTPI, 2003). The unique features of this study are that it covers a much larger amount of public transport evidence and a broader range of issues than previous reviews and, more significantly, it has developed a model to explain variations in fare elasticities across studies. This review covers 902 public transport fare elasticities obtained from 104 studies conducted in Britain between 1951 and 2002. The markets covered are inter-urban rail travel, suburban rail travel, urban bus travel and London underground

Airline Pricing under Different Market Conditions: Evidence from European Low-Cost Carriers

Traditional theories of airline pricing maintain that fares monotonically increase as fewer seats remain available on a flight. A fortiori, this implies a monotonically increasing temporal profile of fares. In this paper, we exploit the presence of drops in offered fares over time as an indicator of an active yield management intervention by two main European Low-Cost Carriers observed daily during the period June 2002 - June 2003. Our results indicate that yield management is effective in raising a flight's load factor. Furthermore, yield management interventions are more intense, and generate a stronger impact, on more competitive routes: one possible interpretation is that a reduction in competitive pressure allows the carriers to adopt a more standardized approach to pricing. Similarly, we find that yield management interventions are more effective in raising the load factor on routes where the customer mix is more heterogenous (i.e., it includes passengers traveling for leisure, business and for family matters). On markets with homogeneous customer base, no robust yield management effect was observed.Easyjet, Intertemporal Pricing, Panel Data, Ryanair, Yield Management

How do Incumbents Respond to the Threat of Entry? Evidence from the Major Airlines

We examine how incumbents respond to the threat of entry by competitors (as distinct from how they respond to actual entry). We look specifically at passenger airlines, using the evolution of Southwest Airlines’ route network to identify particular routes where the probability of future entry rises abruptly. We find incumbents cut fares significantly when threatened by Southwest’s entry. Over half of Southwest’s total impact on incumbent fares occurs before Southwest starts flying. These cuts are only on threatened routes, not those out of non-Southwest competing airports. The evidence on whether incumbents are seeking to deter or accommodate entry is mixed.

Hedonic pricing models for metropolitan bus services

Conventional studies on the pricing of bus services use the cost structure to explain bus fares. In this paper, a hedonic pricing model for bus services in Hong Kong is estimated. The contributions of cost and market factors are uncovered. It is found that the cost factors dominate the determination of bus fares. In contrast to our expectation, bus fares do not react to competition faced by bus companies. Moreover, except the three cross-harbour tunnels, the bus fare has no direct relationship with the tolls of other tunnels. Our model serves well as a reference tool for bus companies to set market-acceptable bus fares.Hedonic Pricing Model, Bus Fares, Kowloon Motor Bus.

The determinants of direct air fares to Cleveland: how competitive?

Using a model developed to examine the determinants of air fares, the authors discuss the relationship between airline industry competitiveness and fare increases.Airlines ; Competition ; Cleveland (Ohio)