Air transport has increased almost fifteen-fold worldwide in the last half-century and is expected to return to this trend in the next few years, after falling from 4.558 billion passengers in 2019 to 1.809 billion passengers in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Airport capacity has not kept pace with such growth and, therefore, more than two hundred major airports worldwide face capacity constraints and are "coordinated". Efficient allocation of scarce airport capacity is critical for air traffic growth, as well as for the overall air transport dynamic efficiency. However, the allocation of airport slots in Europe and elsewhere is still ruled by administrative processes, based on the IATA Worldwide Slot Guidelines, which follow historical precedence (called "Grandfather Rights") and time adjustments of historical slots. Several objections have been raised to the adoption of market mechanisms in slot allocation, as an alternative to administrative processes, and they are still rarely used. Despite often being suggested in the literature, the use of auctions for slot allocation has only been implemented in some local routes in China, and apparently this underemployment of auction mechanisms has been due to the reluctance of coordination authorities to face the risks that have been pointed out regarding airlines' long-term route planning, the usage costs related to excess slots, origin-destination pairing, and competition distortions. However, scoring auctions have never been considered and our research shows that their properties combined with an appropriate auction design could overcome most of those objections and mitigate the associated risks. Furthermore, the current drop in air traffic provides an opportune window for the introduction of auctions as a mechanism for the allocation of airport slots with minimal risks of disruption to airline business models.IN 2019, A "NORMAL YEAR", 1 the aviation industry supported 11.3 million direct aviation jobs and a total of 87.7 million jobs worldwide (the sum of direct aviation jobs, indirect jobs, induced jobs, and tourism catalytic jobs -see next paragraph). It contributed, in a direct way to global GDP by an estimated * The authors are grateful to Lara Gamas for her inspiring work on slot auctions in the context of her MSc degree in Economics. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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During the recent past, passenger air transport has been recovering from its significant retraction during the Covid-19 pandemic. If the recent significant drop in air traffic due to the pandemic acted as an external mitigating factor to airport traffic congestion in several major airports around the world, with the post-pandemic air traffic recovery airport capacity is likely to, once again, fall short of demand and not keep pace with the growth in air traffic. For this reason, close to two hundred major airports worldwide, most of them in Europe, face capacity constraints. Eurocontrol predicts Europe's capacity shortage in 2050 at 500,000 flights/year given the baseline scenario, which could rise to 2.7 million based on an optimistic scenario. The allocation of airport slots in Europe and elsewhere is still ruled by administrative processes, based on IATA's Guidelines, which follow historical precedence and time adjustments of historical slots. Market mechanisms in slot allocation, as an alternative to administrative processes, are controversial and still rarely used. Several authors have highlighted the inefficiency of the current airport slot administrative allocation system, based on those guidelines. Some have suggested improvements within this administrative system, others have suggested new mechanisms altogether, such as congestion pricing mechanisms and other market mechanisms involving auction procedures. Among the various auction mechanisms, scoring auctions and the Progressive Adaptive User Selection Environment (PAUSE) methodology have been suggested. In this paper, and following our previous work, we explore and extend the application of the PAUSE auction mechanism with bidding based on a score function for the auctioneer, which includes another variable in addition to total revenue, where this variable represents the quality of the service provided. We suggest the application of this auction mechanism, in a gradual fashion, to the three international airports operating in Portugal that are level 3 all year round. The different airlines using these airports would still follow the current IATA guidelines during their use of other airports, including the slot exchange protocols. We suggest that some of the PAUSE auction mechanism's desirable properties, such as computability, transparency, absence of envy, and the mitigation of the "price-jump problem", "threshold problem", "exposure problem", and "winner's curse problem", still hold.

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Embora proliferando há três décadas, a independência dos reguladores ainda não é completamente compreendida como uma instituição administrativa na governação dos Estados modernos. Tem fundamentação na teoria neoclássica, mas a economia institucional e dos custos de transação, bem como as perspetivas da economia política também têm dado contributos relevantes. Para melhorar o trade‑off entre independência e responsabilização, têm sido propostas várias condições na nomeação e funcionamento dos reguladores, mas o debate mantém‑se aceso. Os autores debatem a integração dos reguladores na organização do Estado, a sua legitimação, e discutem as competências e deveres compatíveis com essa legitimação e com a sua responsabilização. Finalmente, definem condições necessárias à adequada integração dos reguladores nas instituições do Estado e propõem um “triângulo” para suportar a regulação independente.