(Broadcast Editor’s Note: Vanderbilt has a broadcast facility with a dedicated fiber optic line for live TV interviews and an ISDN line.)
Airlines’ cost-quality tradeoffs:
Michael Lapré, assistant professor of management at the Vanderbilt Owen School of Management, is an operations expert who has conducted extensive research into airlines. With Gary Scudder, he authored the award-winning 2004 paper “Performance Improvement Paths in the U.S. Airline Industry: Linking Trade-offs to Asset Frontiers,” in which they examined 10 airlines over an 11-year period. They looked at quality, based on customer complaints filed with the Department of Transportation, and at decisions the airlines made impacting costs, considering whether airlines could address problems of quality and cost simultaneously. Lapré is available to discuss these same considerations as contributing factors to the declarations of bankruptcy by Northwest and Delta.
Media contact: Susanne Hicks, 615-322-2706
susanne.hicks@vanderbilt.edu