It would have been nice....
Years ago I was on NW I was flying LAX-HNL-NRT-SIN. Mileage run, but I generally don't do true out and back, I stay over a few days -- in fact there were a bunch of us on the flight. All was on time, but on arrival at NRT the agent asked paged a bunch of us to meet him in the jetway. The NRT-SIN flight looked to be overbooked and NW was proactively offering an earlier connection to the SQ flight -- still in coach for all of us but somehow we got the agent to offer a $250 cert for taking the earlier flight and ORC. I figured I'd get in a few hours earlier and take the MRT into the city so I took it and the DL agent called over to SQ and booked me a full center across row on what I recall was the SQ 747. Most everyone else held out figuring that the oversell on the NW flight would get them an OPUP or a bump and a bigger cert.
Ran into some of them later and there were some other misconnects so they all ended up in original coach seats on the NW NRT-SIN flight,
As Carole King sings, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.