James Surowiecki, explaining why it’s so difficult for legacy airlines to change, relays what social scientists Simon Gächter and Arno Riedl call entitlement bargaining…

…for people in a negotiation, ideas of fairness are determined by what happened in the past. Once someone earns a particular cut, all the participants, on both sides of the bargaining table, assume that that person is entitled to a similar cut again, even if conditions have completely changed.