Cristina Barbot

Does airport regulation benefit consumers

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.

A model of consumer choice with vertically differentiated goods: reassessing the traditional demand theory and an application to tourism

Standard vertical differentiation models were designed for a type of consumer behaviour when each consumer buys a single unit of only one of two goods. However, in many other cases, consumers may buy a few units of both goods with different qualities. This case is not covered by theory yet. This paper intends to fill this gap, by modelling consumer behaviour and demand with vertical differentiation when all consumers may buy some mix of both qualities. Additionally, we find that two main results of the previous vertical differentiation literature do not apply in this case and show how the model can be extended to a number of situations. We also present an example of how the model may be applied to Tourism and Transport industries.