Airlines as baseball players: Another approach for evaluating an equal-safety hypothesis

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Czerwinski, David; Barnett, Arnold
• 署名单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.1060.0533
• 发表日期: 2006
• 页码: 1291-1300
• 关键词: transportation air; system safety

摘要

Within the First World, observed differences across air carriers in passenger death risk are almost never statistically significant. But given the rarity of fatal crashes, even a lopsided split of crashes across airlines is unlikely to achieve significance. For greater perspective about relative airline safety performance, we supplemented an analysis of overall mortality data with a two-part statistical procedure. The first part-which was inspired by the way the Oakland Athletics Major League baseball team evaluates individual baseball players-allows for a sharp test of a key aspect of an equal-safety hypothesis, related to the frequency with which individual airlines suffer life-threatening events. The second test considers a further aspect of safety, namely the ability to recover from emergencies given that they have occurred. When applied to U.S. domestic jet services over 1983-2002, the test procedures indicate that long-established airlines have been about equally (and hugely) successful in protecting their passengers from accidental death and that established airlines are not demonstrably safer than the new-entrant jet carriers formed after U.S. airline deregulation.