Relationships Under Stress: Relational Outsourcing in the U.S. Airline Industry After the 2008 Financial Crisis
研究了美国航空业在2008年金融危机后，主要航空公司如何调整与区域合作伙伴的关系契约，发现它们并未终止合作，而是根据关系价值缩小外包范围以恢复可信度。
This paper studies how firms restructure their relational contracts in the face of permanent shocks to the value of their relationships. In the context of the U.S. airline industry, we argue that major carriers enter self-enforcing agreements with their outsourced regional partners because a key aspect of airline operations—the exchange of landing slots under adverse weather—is formally noncontractible. We show empirically that major and regional airlines did not terminate their relational contracts after the 2008 crisis but rather, restructured the scope of such contracts in a way that restored their credibility. In particular, we show that a major airline was less likely to continue outsourcing a route to a regional partner after the 2008 crisis the lower the present discounted value of their preexisting relationship and hence, the larger the negative effect of the crisis on the relational contract’s “self-enforcing range.” This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy.