Description:

Laurie Garrow, Associate Professor of Transportation Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Airline itinerary choice models support many multi-million dollar decisions, e.g., they are used to evaluate potential route schedules and inform aircraft purchase decisions. Classic itinerary choice models suffer from major limitations, most notably they use average fare information but to not correct for price endogeneity. In 2013, Dr. Garrow established the first (and to date only) academic partnership with the Airlines Reporting Corporation. Through this partnership, she has access to six years of ticketing data for U.S. carriers. We use this database of airline tickets to estimate itinerary choice and compare these to classic itinerary choice models that use aggregate fare information but correct for price endogeneity. We describe how we plan to extend our approach to evaluate consumer welfare impacts of recent U.S. airline mergers.

Biography:

Dr. Garrow is an Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D. at Northwestern University, with an emphasis on travel demand modeling and airline passenger behavior. Her dissertation won first prize in the 2004 Aviation Applications Section of INFORMS and honorable mention in the 2004 Eric Pas dissertation competition sponsored by the International Association of Travel Behavior Research. She has received multiple awards for her work, including the CUTC-ARTBA New Faculty Member Award, a NSF CAREER Award, and the ASCE Walter L. Huber Research Prize. She currently serves as President of AGIFORS.