Broad and narrow price parity agreements: Evidence from European hotels
研究了酒店与在线旅行社合同中的价格平价条款，发现限制最宽泛的平价条款但保留较窄版本可使价格下降约1.5%、入住率提高1个百分点；完全禁止平价条款则使价格下降0-4%，但对入住率无影响。
This paper investigates the effect of “price parity” clauses in contracts between hotels and online travel agencies (OTAs). These restrictions require a hotel to set its lowest prices for a given room on a travel agency’s website and have come under recent scrutiny by antitrust regulators. We use a synthetic control strategy to study a series of policy changes in Europe using novel data on transacted hotel prices and occupancy. Our analysis finds that (i) restricting the broadest form of parity clauses, but leaving in place a more limited version, reduced prices by about 1.5% and increased occupancy by 1 percentage point; (ii) relative to narrow parity, a complete ban on parity clauses reduced prices by between 0 and 4%, but had no impact on occupancy.