Does Airport Regulation Benefit Consumers?

Abstract

Airport regulation is aimed to impose price caps or other schemes on services supplied by airports to airlines that use them. However, it is not clear that regulation benefits the final consumers, the passengers. In the context of a very simple model, this paper finds out that this doesn’t always happen, and that passengers may be worse off with price capping than in an unregulated equilibrium. Besides, the paper provides an insight of the results of other regulation approaches (other than price caps) that have been suggested for airports.