Contrived Competition: Airline Regulation and Deregulation, 1925–1988

Although many have studied regulatory policy in the United States, few have viewed it as a process, shaping markets and industries and, in turn, being affected by the structures it helped to create. By looking at the forty-year history of airline regulation and then focusing on one company's adaptations to deregulation, this article demonstrates that monocausal explanations fail to capture the complex and dynamic nature of the interaction between regulation and competition in America.