contact Hubert Horan at horanaviation@gmail.com
Over his long career Hubert Horan has worked on many of the most critical issues in the field of transportation economics, including the impact of regulation and mergers on industry efficiency, and the impacts of consolidation and other industry structural changes on consumer welfare. His early career focused on railroads and urban transport, and then refocused on aviation in the early 1980s. He recently emerged as one of the leading experts on the economics of Uber, and the impacts of the major structural shifts in the taxicab industry on efficiency and overall consumer welfare.
Horan was directly involved with all of the major changes aviation has seen including US deregulation, European liberalization, domestic and cross-border mergers, low-cost carrier development and bankruptcy restructuring. In addition to extensive consulting work he held airline management positions with Northwest, America West, Swissair and Sabena. He is a leading expert on international airline alliances, having developed the original Northwest-KLM alliance that served as the template for all subsequent global joint ventures. The full range of his aviation experience is described under “Aviation Experience”.
Over the years Horan has published a range of articles on airline competition, the evolution of airline business models, airpolitical issues, mergers and industry consolidation. His 2010 Transportation Law Journal article “Double Marginalization and the Counter-Revolution Against Liberal Airline Competition” documents how the DOT abandoned its longstanding market-friendly, pro-consumer policies in order to drive a radical consolidation of international aviation into a permanent cartel.
He has testified on merger and competitive issues before the United States Congress and the Department of Transportation has been frequently quoted in newspaper, television and industry trade journal pieces on aviation, and has led multiple graduate school seminars on airline competition. Copies of his testimony, articles and seminars can be downloaded at the “Aviation Publications” tab.
Horan’s strong knowledge of the economics of transport competition and regulation allowed him to demonstrate that Uber’s original business model was incapable of earning sustainable profits under competitive market conditions. His analysis demonstrated that Uber was significantly less efficient that the traditional taxi operators it drove out of business, that its meteoric growth depended on unsustainable multi-billion-dollar subsidies, and explained why Uber lost $33 billion in its first 14 years of operation. He subsequently documented that Uber’s subsequent P&L improvements required completely abandoning the pricing and service strategies that had originally fueled its growth and popularity and depended on exploiting significant anti-competitive market power.
Most recently, Horan published a major article “Understanding the LLM Bubble”. After summarizing the overwhelming evidence of a huge overinvestment bubble, the article focuses on the largely overlooked questions of how a capital misallocation of this magnitude could have been created and sustained, and why the alignment of powerful supporting groups will make correcting this misallocation far more difficult than any previous bubble. The article documents how the LLM industry has been following the exact Uber playbook in order to massively inflate perceptions of companies that have abysmal economics.
These analyses can be downloaded at the “LLM Bubble & Uber” tab.
Mr. Horan graduated from Wesleyan University in 1976 with a B.A. degree and Honors in Economics. In 1980 he graduated from Yale University’s School of Management with an MPPM (MBA) degree. He is currently based in Phoenix, Arizona