博士（経済） / 16, 300 p. / Hitotsubashi University

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Doctor of Philosophy / Economics / Philip G. Gayle / This dissertation consists of three essays on product quality in commercial aviation. Since the mid-1990s, major airlines that serve the U.S. domestic market have increasingly found it appealing to form alliances. Amidst the recent emergence of airline alliance formation, this dissertation has sought to answer questions on the product quality implications of policies regarding cooperation among airlines in the U.S. domestic air travel industry. A challenge that empirical work faces in studying the relationship between airline alliances and product quality is to find reasonable measure(s) of product quality. The first essay sheds light on whether the route network integration that comes with an airline alliance provides sufficient extra incentive to partner carriers to improve their flight routing quality. Evidence suggests that routing quality for Delta/Continental/Northwest's--our alliance of interest--products decreases in markets where pre-alliance competition among alliance partners exists, resulting in substantial negative welfare effects for passengers. In fact, routing quality for Delta/Continental/Northwest products decreased by 0.256% below the mean routing quality of the entire sample's products. More interestingly, the codeshare effects in specific markets where the alliance firms competed prior to the alliance, are also negatively associated with routing quality of the alliance firms' products, resulting in a fall in consumer utility of $0.5 per consumer. The second essay explores the potential relationship between on-time performance and airline code-sharing. Although flight delay has always received much attention, we are unaware of any empirical research that measures the on-time performance effects of airline alliances. We empirically investigate the on-time performance effects of the largest U.S. domestic alliance that began in June 2003--an alliance between Delta Air Lines, Northwest Airlines and Continental Airlines. We find evidence that code-sharing improves alliance partners' on-time performance and that the size of the alliance effect on on-time performance depends on pre-alliance competition in a market, with the effect being larger in markets where the partners competed in prior to the alliance. Using a structural econometric model, the third essay attempts to provide an alternative explanation to a long-standing question: why are airlines late? Airlines usually claim that air travel delays are out of their control, placing the blame on adverse weather or air traffic control as the most common reasons. Despite these claims, data on causes of flight delay reveal that the share of delay caused by weather and air traffic control has been on the decline while the share of delay caused by airlines has been on the rise. This suggests that on-time performance improvement is well within the reach of carriers. We investigate why airlines have little or no incentive to improve on-time performance. We also measure the cost of delay borne by consumers in terms of how much monetary value they are willing to pay to avoid delay. We find that consumers are willing to pay $0.78 for every minute of arrival delay which after extrapolation, amounts to consumer welfare effects of $1.76 billion. Our findings suggest that airlines have little to no incentive because their markups do not increase when they improve on-time performance. In fact, the marginal increase in price resulting from on-time performance improvement is offset by an increase in marginal cost causing a zero net effect on markup.

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This paper shows how airline passenger service necessities can be scrutinized by utilizing Kano's model of quality component and examines the potential advantages that can be accomplished by applying this way to deal with marketing strategy planning. As per Kano's model, quality components can be grouped into three classifications, to be specific must-be, One-dimensional and Attractive needs, contingent upon their capacity to make consumer satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Aftereffects of this review propose that airline passenger service components could be grouped comparable with Kano's model to recognize the most critical passenger service components. Effects of the service components highlights on passenger satisfaction or dissatisfaction have been likewise figured as estimation records for development.

<p>Wizz Airline company was established only three years ago. This thesis explores the customers' satisfaction about their services. The data was collected from internet forums and journals. The final conclusion was that the majority are satisfied with Wizz Air's services.</p>

Wizz Airline company was established only three years ago. This thesis explores the customers' satisfaction about their services. The data was collected from internet forums and journals. The final conclusion was that the majority are satisfied with Wizz Air's services.

This study explores the notions of 'success' and 'failure' held by senior executives in the UK and Irish airline industry. Previous studies of this industry have tended to be from a positivist perspective, focusing on financial performance at the level of 'airline' or 'airline industry'. This study takes the airline executive as the unit of analysis and is conducted from a phenomenological perspective. A methodology using interviews, causal mapping and postal questionnaires is applied to surface the notions of 'success' and 'failure' and the perception of the causes of 'success' held by board-level airline executives. Standardised data published by the Civil Aviation Authority Economic Research Group is used to establish a range of objective measures, both financial and operational, and these objective measures are compared with the rankings of the senior executives' perceptions of the success of UK and Irish airlines. The research establishes that senior airline executives do not see 'success' in terms of financial objective measures such as Added Value or Operating Ratio; they use profit as the primary financial measure of 'success' and frequently hold notions of 'success' that are based in other functional areas such as operations and marketing. The causes of 'success' are seen as coming from the breadth of functional areas. The influence of HRM factors becomes clearer at deeper levels of abstraction when considering 'success'. There is limited evidence of the stereotyping of perceptions when the success of specific airlines is considered, but not for airlines' success in general. Recommendations for further research into the management of human resources within airlines are made.

A barrier to creating the platform-independent services envisioned by middleware-based development infrastructures is the level of performance robustness of the distributed applications created with them, in lieu of unpredictable variations in application behavior or in the resources available for satisfying user requests. Our goal is to improve the behavior locality of distributed applications and to prevent performance (mis-)behaviors from spilling across certain boundaries, since such spillage weakens behavior diagnoses and/or weakens or disables the effects of locally applied control or management methods. Toward these ends, we develop a novel software abstraction, termed {em isolation points} (I-points), which can be used to isolate application components or subsystems from each other. The main contributions of this work are Isolation Points, which are software abstractions for monitoring and understanding dynamic runtime behaviors to better isolation application components hence creating more robust distributed applications. Two concrete artifacts using I-points also developed in this thesis are: I(solation)-RMI and I(solatoin)-Queue. I-RMI demonstrates the utility of isolation points in J2EE's RMI-IIOP domain. I(solation)-Queue applies isolation points to message passing systems.