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This paper studies the capacity allocation game between duopolistic airlines which could offer callable products. Previous literature has shown that callable products provide a riskless source of additional rev- enue for a monopolistic airline. We examine the impact of the introduction of callable products on the revenues and the booking limits of duopolistic airlines. The analytical results demonstrate that, when there is no spill of low-fare customers, offering callable products is a dominant strategy of both airlines and provides Pareto gains to both airlines. When customers of both fare classes spill, offering callable products is no longer a dominant strategy and may harm the revenues of the airlines. Numerical ex- amples demonstrate that whether the two airlines offer callable products and whether offering callable products is beneficial to the two airlines mainly depends on their loads and capacities. Specifically, when the difference between the loads of the airlines is large, the loads of the airlines play the most important role. When the difference between the loads of the airlines is small, the capacities of the airlines play the most important role. Moreover, numerical examples show that the booking limits of the two airlines in the case with callable products are always higher than those in the case without callable products.

This paper is a follow-up of the work [Chen, J.-S.: J. Optimiz. Theory Appl., Submitted for publication (2004)] where an NCP-function and a descent method were proposed for the nonlinear complementarity problem. An unconstrained reformulation was formulated due to a merit function based on the proposed NCP-function. We continue to explore properties of the merit function in this paper. In particular, we show that the gradient of the merit function is globally Lipschitz continuous which is important from computational aspect. Moreover, we show that the merit function is <i>SC</i> ¹ function which means it is continuously differentiable and its gradient is semismooth. On the other hand, we provide an alternative proof, which uses the new properties of the merit function, for the convergence result of the descent method considered in [Chen, J.-S.: J. Optimiz. Theory Appl., Submitted for publication (2004)].