|
Abstract: The code sharing is the common and effective cooperation among the airlines, and reaching the code sharing agreement is an essential precondition for pricing code sharing tickets and making profits from these tickets. Because there is few study on the free-sale code sharing agreement and the profit-sharing mechanism, this paper focuses on optimizing the choices of the free-sale code sharing agreement under the profit-sharing mechanism. Firstly, this paper proposes the spoke model to be close to the descriptions of the passengers’ preference on different airlines in the reality. Secondly, we construct the noncooperative-cooperative biform game model, which integrates the noncooperative game with the cooperative game. In the noncooperative game part, the airlines consider all the possible code sharing agreement from their own perspectives, which means that all the available competitive situations are taken into account. In the cooperative game part, the code sharing airlines can share the profit of the grand coalition by joint-pricing for tickets, and the competitive situations formed in the noncooperative game part are compared according to the airlines’ profits obtained in the cooperative game part. The remarkable features of the noncooperative-cooperative biform game include: the airlines’ profits are unpredictable in each competitive situation of the noncooperative game part; the grand coalitions of the cooperative game part may vary from one situation to another, and any sub-coalitions have externality. Combining the most likely spitting process of joint pricing coalitions, the Shapley value and the two-step Shapley value are used as the allocation methods in the cooperative game part. Furthermore, the numerical experiments verify the efficiency of the proposed models and the solving method, and the comparison results show that the free-sale code sharing agreement under the profit-sharing mechanism has some advantages, particularly in the aviation markets where only one airline is more famous than others. Therefore, this paper provides the significant theoretical and methodical supports to optimize the choices of the code sharing agreements and to improve the total social welfare in the aviation market.
|