New Measures to Compare Network Configurations of Full-Service and Low-Cost Carriers

Traditional analyses of airline networks have attempted to measure the network configuration by means of variables such as traffic distribution or flight frequency concentration (McShan 1986; Caves et al. 1984; Toh and Higgins 1985; Reynolds-Feighan 1994, 1998, 2001; Bowen 2002). These methodologies have mainly addressed the issue of describing and classifying networks in terms of measures of geographical concentration, but they have not addressed this issue as a comparison of real network configurations with ideal HS and PP structures. Although geographical concentration and network configuration are related concepts, they are not coincident. Geographical concentration indices, such as the Gini or the Theil indices, provide a measure of how strong the frequency concentration is in the main airports. HS and PP measures of network configuration do indeed depend upon the shape of the network and the connectivity of airports.