Originally Posted by
El Bunto
Per that link, more marketing lies: "it means aircraft leave with empty seats, increasing our costs...". Note that they provide no information as to how costs magically "increase" if an aircraft departs with empty seats. Actually the fuel burn is fractionally reduced... They presumably mean "cost per passenger carried" but that doesn't sound as good a justification.
They just mean cost per ticket.
Overbooking increases the number of tickets they can sell, which reduces the cost to be covered by each ticket.
Seems pretty reasonable explanation on the link.
If they didn't overbook the cost of each ticket would increase, and therefore so would the price. This would just leave all customers paying more whether they ended up travelling or not.