Incentives in landing slot problems

During weather-induced airport congestion, landing slots are reassigned based on flights' feasible arrival times and cancelations. We consider the airlines' incentives to report such information and to execute cancelations, creating positive spillovers for other flights. We show that such incentives conflict with Pareto-efficiency, partially justifying the FAA's non-solicitation of delay costs. We provide mechanisms that, unlike the FAA's current mechanism, satisfy our incentive properties to the greatest extent possible given the FAA's own design constraints. Our mechanisms supplement Deferred Acceptance with a “self-optimization” step accounting for each airline's granted right to control its assigned portion of the landing schedule.