BECCLE has the pleasure to invite to a seminar with Matthias Hunold on the topic “Hotel rankings of online travel agents, channel pricing and consumer protection”.

Time and Place:
Thursday February 8th, 12:45-14:00
Seminar room 327, Department of Economics, UoB, Herman Foss gt. 6
The seminar is free and open to the public.The seminar will be held in English.

On the topic
This seminar adds to BECCLEs recent focus on the online market for hotels in which platforms such as Hotels.com, Booking.com and Expedia are major players.

Matthias and his coauthors summarize their current research as follows:
“We investigate whether online travel agents (OTAs) assign hotels worse positions in their search results if these set lower hotel prices at other OTAs or on their own websites. We formally characterize how such a strategy can be used by an OTA to reduce price differentiation across distribution channels. Our empirical analysis shows that the position of a hotel in the search results of OTAs is better when the prices charged by the hotel on other channels are higher. This is consistent with the hypothesis that OTAs bias their search results to discipline hotels for aggressive prices on competing channels, and by this reduce search quality for consumers.”

Speaker:

Matthias Hunold

Assistant Professor

Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE)