A. Belianin (u hse), R. Chustusian (u hse): Entry and strategic behaviour in the Russian airline market
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A. Belianin (U HSE), R. Chustusian (U HSE): Entry and strategic behaviour in the Russian airline marketThe paper studies strategic interactions of the leading Russian airline companies in 2000-2007, focusing on their entry behaviour. Over the last fifteen years, this market saw quite a few changes, starting from disaggregation of the former state monopoly, Aeroflot, to real competition of a few hundred companies within different regions and scale of operation, and to consolidation of the market in the very last years. Nowadays the air passenger transportation in Russia, being indispensable in some areas, is highly concentrated: six biggest players (Aeroflot, S7, Utair, Atlant Soyuz, GTK Russia and Uralskie Avialinii) control over 80% of the domestic market. Further peculiarities include largely outdated fleet, rising variable expenses (first of all, fuel), unsatisfactory security, and technological, financial and political constraints of competition on particular itineraries, etc. At the same time, the market has been developing at large: with a high and steady increase in demand, new market dispositions as well as mergers and acquisitions took place every season. This raises several questions: do the main firms compete against each other or do they collude? Is there any evidence of multimarket contact and competition? Do Russian firms benefit or make use of their control over particular airport hubs? Last but not least, what can be said about the optimal business strategies of the firms – in particular, are the firms rational in their entry decisions, and to what extent are their existing networks profit-maximizing? Canonical answers to these questions in the applied IO literature assume that firms’ entry decisions are functions of variable profits and (unobservable) fixed entry costs, which constitute natural or artificial entry barriers. Traditional empirical approach by Bresnahan and Reiss (1988; 1990; 1992) is not appropriate in our context because of the multimarket contact and other strategic considerations, as well as of some assumptions which are clearly inappropriate in our application (such as homogeneity of firms or linearity of demand in passengers’ income). Furthermore, many variables determining variable profit (such as cost ingredients) are not directly observable. To correct for these deficiencies and to account for the firms’ strategic considerations, we use stimulation estimators (Berry, 1992; Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes, 1995), together with several structural assumptions on the nature of competition and firm interaction, to obtain unbiased estimates of the main factors affecting decisions to enter. Estimation results suggest that (1) firm behavior is marked by collusive considerations and (2) there is room for improvement of the firms’ itinerary networks. Directory: data data -> Iea shcp/pvps working Group on pv/t solar Systems data -> Jaeyong song data -> By Fel (aka James Galloway) Table of Contents Chapter 1 data -> Vitaly Goldshteyn data -> Hurricane Katrina, a climatological Perspective October 2005, Updated August 2006 Introduction data -> 1997 Atlantic Tropical Storms data -> Introduction data -> The Impact of Saharan dust aerosols on tropical cyclones using wrf-chem: Model framework and satellite data constraint technique data -> Earth-Atmosphere Interactions: Tropical Storm and Hurricane Activity in the Caribbean and Consequent Health Impacts data -> Meeting Of September 16, 2010 today’s meeting Download 4.25 Kb. Share with your friends:
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