(Edit: 2023-01-16) Don't just predict this one, please check out the other 12 travel predictions! Thanks! https://manifold.markets/group/scotts-cheap-flights-going-2023-pre
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Sticking my neck out here, but I think there’s a decent chance one of the six largest US airlines (American, Delta, United, Alaska, JetBlue, or Southwest) will try to purchase a smaller carrier. (Not counting the proposed JetBlue-Spirit merger, of course.) Alaska buying Hawaiian? Frontier and Allegiant combining? As a cheap flight lover I hope we don’t see any more mergers, but hey it’s fun to speculate!
(60% confidence)
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This is question #12 from Scott Keyes' annual travel predictions at Scott's Cheap Flights (now Going).
Since Scott resolved and graded his 2022 predictions before the end of 2022, I am setting the close date ahead of the end of the year, to (try to) avoid a situation where he posts the resolutions before the market closes. In the event that his resolution post falls in 2024, my apologies in advance. If he hasn't posted resolutions at all by February 1, 2024, I will do my best to resolve them personally, and set N/A for any questions that I can't determine with outside (non-Going) source data.
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@GabeGarboden I'm inclined to agree, but we're predicting the rating assigned by Scott Keyes, so I don't think it much matters what we think on that subject.
@nikki per the description, this market will quite likely not resolve until Scott Keyes posts the results of his travel predictions.
Since Scott resolved and graded his 2022 predictions before the end of 2022, I am setting the close date ahead of the end of the year, to (try to) avoid a situation where he posts the resolutions before the market closes. In the event that his resolution post falls in 2024, my apologies in advance. If he hasn't posted resolutions at all by February 1, 2024, I will do my best to resolve them personally, and set N/A for any questions that I can't determine with outside (non-Going) source data.
There's a base rate of roughly one airline merger per year listed on https://www.airlines.org/dataset/u-s-airline-mergers-and-acquisitions/,
of which 40-50% appear to meet your criteria for "big 6" (applying those criteria retroactively over the current century, so for instance the 2005 US Airways / America West Airlines merger is counted as a yes because US Airways later merged into American in 2013). The JetBlue/Spirit merger has been explicitly excluded. The odds that this year's major merger is actually one of two are at best that 40-50%, but naively the odds that there are two major mergers this year would be in the 16-25% range. Also, the Biden DOJ has indicated that it intends to file a lawsuit to prevent the JetBlue/Spirit merger, and hence I'd conjecture that they'd do much the same thing to any merger involving another of the big 6. JetBlue and Spirit are both around 5% of the market (#6 and 7 on the list here https://www.transtats.bts.gov/) and non-top-10 airlines represent a total of 8% of the market, so if we suppose that any merger exceeding 10% will be nixed (or slowed) by legal proceedings... is that a resolve YES or NO? Anyway, the only airlines which could propose a merger in that scenario are Alaska and JetBlue because the other four are >10% already. Realistically, I don't see this resolving Yes except by technicality.
@NicoTerry Thanks for the thoughtful and thoroughly reasoned comment.
As to your question about whether a nixed or delayed-beyond-2023 merger counts as YES or NO - I can’t tell you. I merely imported this and several other predictions from the published article from Scott Keyes at Going that’s linked. Would be nice to get Scott on Manifold to inveigh on the question! I wrote him to invite him after posting his predictions but, sadly, he hasn’t yet written back yet.