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Introduction
Strategic alliances have become a key feature in many sectors of the economy and especially in the airline industry ([11] Goh and Uncles, 2003). Since the 1990s, "the general consensus is that if an airline does not join an alliance it will be operating under a serious handicap" ([20] Li, 2000). The biggest airlines, like British Airways, United Airlines, American Airlines, Lufthansa and AirFrance consider strategic airline alliances as the central element of their development. Actually, the majority of airlines are, or are trying to become, members of an international strategic airline alliance, i.e. of global airline alliances (GAA) ([25] O'Toole, 2000). [39] Youssef and Hansen (1994) argue that there are two broad reasons for it. On one hand, there is an improvement in technical economic efficiency in terms of scale and networks and services, and, on the other hand, airlines are motivated to increase their joint market power and to be better positioned for competition. Alliances enable them to bypass the law on the ban on mergers, permit the development of synergies, and make networks profitable ([16], [15] Gulati, 1998, 1999). As a result, these GAA (like Star Alliance born in 1997, Oneworld in 1999, and Skyteam in 2000) draw everyone's attention, as they hold more than 50 percent of the world revenue passenger kilometres.
This paper intends to present GAA from a complementary angle to the existing works: "specific social networks." "Social" as we are dealing with an inter-organizational network through business relations between airline companies and "specific" as these are formal relations of contractual types (joint marketing, code sharing agreements). To value GAA, we will refer to the graph theory. This is the oldest and the most formalized approach for dealing with the components of a network. The rest is question of analogy or theoretic appropriateness, as graph theory has been used in many fields (geography, sociology, and physics). It constitutes the keystone of the modelling and the search of the properties of structured set. Thanks to graph theory, we can thus observe the relationships between actors in order to infer information about the groups and positions that actors can hold within these groups and the network structure will then explain the competitivity ([21] Lowrie and MacKnight, 2004). First of all,...