Rarely Tried, and . . . Rarely Successful: Theoretically Impossible Price Predation Among the Airlines

Two large bodies of literature bearing on the competitive health of the deregulated airlines are in sharp conflict: (1) the volumes of judicial and academic output to the effect that the phenomenon of predatory pricing is, as a practical matter, impossible; and (2) the similarly massive body of industry-specific theory and empirical evidence that predation not only occurs in airline markets, but has been a key tool to preserve market power held by the surviving legacy carriers. This article seeks to establish from the latter that the former is a poor basis for policy, especially if there is nothing really so special about airline markets as to make predation uniquely likely there. This article therefore offers a basically derivative, but essential, empiricism to the largely theoretical predation debate.