Assignment of Arrival Slots

Abstract

Industry participants agree that, when inclement weather forces the FAA to reassign airport landing slots, incentives and property rights should be respected. We show that the FAA's Compression algorithm is incentive compatible, but fails to guarantee a form of property rights. This is significant since these conditions were the motivation for introducing Compression a decade ago. We give an alternative mechanism that does satisfy these conditions. It has the flavor of Top Trading Cycle variants of Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez (1999) and Pápai (2000) for related but distinct models. Finally, both mechanisms may fail another condition: the incentive to vacate unusable landing slots. (JEL D45, D82, L93, L98, P14, R41)