Much Ado About Nothing? Online Platform Price Parity Clauses and the EU Booking.com Case

Online platforms often impose Price Parity Clauses to prevent sellers from charging lower prices on alternative sales channels. We provide quasi-experimental evidence on the full removal of Price Parity Clauses in France in 2015 and in Italy in 2017 for hotels listed on Booking.com. Our analysis reveals a relatively limited effect on room prices in both the short and the medium run. Only hotels affiliated with chains significantly decreased their prices in the medium run. Overall, we find that the benefits were restricted to a subset of consumers using Booking.com.