Intermediaries often arise in order to facilitate trade in markets characterized by asymmetric information. In the travel industry, policymakers have tried to address information asymmetries by providing hotel ratings. We show that those ratings are noisy indicators of quality because of the use...

In this paper we discuss the present and future role of tour operators (and intermediation in general) after the advent of internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs). We adopt the transaction costs economics framework so as to be able to analyse the role that tour...