Determinants of competitive dynamics between airlines: A panel regression study on Turkish international airline market

This dissertation aims to detect the effective factors on the airline firms' competitive actions and reveal whether these factors change by the type of actions taken by these airlines in the context of Turkish international airline market. The dependent variables of the research are the number of competitive actions, and the independent variables are 12 variables that indicate the structure of the airlines, the resources of the airlines, the market alliances, and the market relations. The panel regression analysis is applied to test the research models. The results of the research reveal that there is a negative effect of the size of the firm, number of flights, human resources, and slack resources on the tariff-based actions. On the other hand, fleet homogeneity, resource deployment capability, and market commonality positively affect the tariff-based actions. The research shows that human resources, slack resources, fleet homogeneity and market commonality positively affect the capacity-based actions. It also reveals that there is a negative effect of size of the firm and firm maturity on the capacity-based actions. Number of flights, firm maturity, slack resources, and fleet homogeneity positively affect the price-based actions. Human resources, resource similarity, resource deployment capability, market commonality negatively affect the price-based actions. Market alliances, human resources, slack resources, the market commonality have a positive; size of the firm has a negative effect on the comfort-based actions. Number of flights, market alliances, slack resources, and market commonality has a positive; size of the firm and firm maturity have a negative effect on the image-based actions. As a result, it can be observed that different factors rely on various competitive actions, and the same factor has different effects based on the type of actions taken in the research model.