Tiziana D'Alfonso

Airport–Airline interaction: some food for thought

Abstract We provide an interpretive analysis of vertical relations between airports and carriers, while assessing the way in which deregulation of the airline market and the privatization of airports have created incentives for airport–airline interaction. In particular, if the vertical structure approach has become the standard approach in air transport research, we add to the literature by discussing three issues that we believe need further understanding. The three issues that we think should be the focus of future research on airport–airline interaction are (i) incomplete contracts and asymmetric information structure; (ii) upstream horizontal complementarities; and (iii) airports as two-sided platforms.

Un modello per la determinazione del costo standard nei servizi di trasporto pubblico locale su autobus in Italia

We estimate the standard costs in the Italian local bus transport system by means of a top down approach. Commercial speed results the most important cost driver, while economies of scale are low and only present in the case of small transport operators. Medium sized and large operators exhibit diseconomies of scale. We find a positive correlation between investments in bus fleet and service cost. The model aims at introducing policy criteria for the allocation of public funds earmarked to the local public transit sector among Italian regions.

Market Structure and Partnership Levels in Air-Rail Cooperation

In this paper, we build a theoretical model to study the underlying factors behind the various partnership levels in different cooperation schemes between airline and high-speed rail (HSR). We study two different intermodal relationships: a parallel one where the networks of the airline and the rail operator overlap partially and a vertical one where they do not overlap at all. We examine the situations when the cooperation levels are either exogenous or endogenous. For any given cooperation level, we show that the incremental profit of a vertical partnership is higher than that of a parallel partnership. However, when the two types of partnerships are both possible, the parallel partnership might be dominated by the vertical partnership only when the air-rail connecting service is sufficiently inferior to the connecting flight. The social welfare level of a parallel partnership is higher than that of a vertical partnership when the air-rail connecting service is sufficiently superior to the connecting flight. When the cooperation level is also a decision variable, a parallel partnership will have higher cooperation level than a vertical partnership when the travel time of HSR is sufficiently short compared with that of air.