Multimarket Contact and Welfare Implications for Airline Passengers

Abstract When conducting routine welfare analysis, regulators typically associate the exercise of market power to internal market characteristics such as market shares. However, some researchers argue that factors that are external to a market such as contact across markets may have an impact on market outcomes. An interesting but unanswered question is: how do cross-market factors such as multimarket contact affect consumer welfare? Using a nested logit demand model for air travel, we are able to monetarily estimate the consumer welfare effects of multimarket contact. We find that multimarket contact results in a consumer welfare loss of $0.57 per contact. Extrapolating this welfare cost across consumers and across products proves to be quite sizeable. These negative welfare effects are stronger in long haul markets.