What is Digital Valuation Made of? The integration of valuation poles on a reservation platform and its effects on the hotel industry in Switzerland

Abstract

Digital platforms act as new powerful intermediaries challenging existing market orders in many sectors. Algorithmically producing ratings and rankings often built from online consumer reviews, platforms are important players in the digitizing of valuation. This article asks how these new platform-generated valuations relate to other forms of valuation. It presents a qualitative case study of valuation in the hotel sector in Switzerland, drawing on interviews with professionals and a description of valuation categories on the Booking.com website. Going beyond the description of the opposition between online consumer reviews and traditional judgment devices, the analysis shows that valuation on the platform is based upon a permissive hierarchical integration of a plurality of valuation poles, with algorithmic valuation at its center. This destabilizes the evaluative landscape with regard to three issues: lack of transparency of the algorithmic ranking; weakening and even undermining of formulaic valuation; and the issue of singularization of the online offer.

Valuing Data: Attaching online data to stakes, selves, and other data

“…Building upon a vast array of digital technologies, digitised valuation appropriates new possibilities, necessities, and constraints to forge relations; or to cut them. Digital infrastructure comes with inscribed configurations of worth (see, e.g., Balsiger and Jammet (2022) as well as Krüger and Petersohn (2022) in this theme issue of Valuation Studies), and users are called to adopt or discard, process, and rearrange them. Crucially, virtual collaboration takes place in technologically mediated, synthetic moments whose configuration shapes the performance of valuation.…”

“…As scholars have shown, digitised valuation can absorb, reprocess, and sometimes subvert the measures of worth inscribed in databases, search engines and platforms, as well as, e.g. the ranks and feeds of social media (Kropf and Laser 2019; Lee and Helgesson 2020;Paßmann and Schubert 2021; see also Balsiger and Jammet 2022 in this theme issue). When data becomes the subject of digitised valuation, both the "infrastructured-ness" of data and its valuation can inspire reflection and doubt.…”

When Platforms Challenge Professions: A Clash Between Models of Professionalism Among Swiss Hoteliers?

“…access suffered considerably in the course of neo-liberal reforms of the 1990s, when the market was liberalized (Humair & Tissot, 2011). More recently, the stars-based classification increasingly competes with user-based evaluations on platforms (Balsiger & Jammet, 2022). As a result of these changes in regulation and technology, the professional autonomy of hoteliers is increasingly threatened.…”

Vol. 14 No. 1 (2024)

“…access suffered considerably in the course of neo-liberal reforms of the 1990s, when the market was liberalized (Humair & Tissot, 2011). More recently, the stars-based classification increasingly competes with user-based evaluations on platforms (Balsiger & Jammet, 2022). As a result of these changes in regulation and technology, the professional autonomy of hoteliers is increasingly threatened.…”