Incentives in Landing Slot Problems

During weather-induced congestion at airports, a centralized mechanism reassigns landing slots based on airlines’ (i) executed flight cancelations and (ii) reported feasible arrival times. We consider airline incentives to perform (i) and (ii), along with (iii) reporting relative flight delay costs. Inducing cancelations during congestion is particularly important since cancelations have positive spillovers for the remaining flights in the schedule. Our main contribution is to provide a class of mechanisms for which executing and reporting flight cancelations necessarily improves the position of each other flight in the schedule. This contrasts with a potential disincentive to cancel a flight under the FAA’s current Compression mechanism (Schummer and Vohra, 2013). Our mechanisms also provide a more robust incentive to truthfully report feasible arrival times than Compression. Finally, by showing that Pareto-efficiency conflicts with any one of our three incentive constraints we partially justify the use of mechanisms that ignore delay costs.