OTOH, demonstrating willingness to use force to boot people off the plane if there aren't volunteers should decrease their future cost of dealing with overbooking, because the perceived alternative to taking a buyout offer is no longer "sit pat and be guaranteed to keep my seat."
Sure, but a whole lot of good that does you if people choose not to book with you in the first place because "Might get beaten up instead of transported to destination."
Yeah that would be nice. Unfortunately the air travel market is a fairly inefficient market. The cost of entry is super high, there are fairly few players and the big ones are good at doing nice nice with the government. In addition we allow them to undermine what little competition there is by creating their anti market alliances. I booked Air Canada to fly to Europe. I traveled via Canada to get away from US carriers. However, a few weeks before the trip they put us on a United flight because they are in some alliance together. Of course you frequently have very few reasonable options to begin with. It's a awfully broken market and I have no idea how we could possibly fix it. I constantly fly with airlines I hate (pretty much all American carriers but Virgin) because it's so cumbersome to avoid.
