Favoring Friction: Examining Hotel Browsing and Buying through the Lens of the Bazaar

Abstract

This paper examines the domestic market for hotels in India and attempts to solve what at first appears to be a puzzle: in the context of a highly digitized market, with plentiful information about hotels and their prices available online, the majority of bookings are made offline and involve time-intensive, socially-mediated browsing and buying activities which we term “bazaar behaviors”. By engaging with the anthropology of bazaars and markets, in particular the work of Clifford Geertz, we show that the qualities of hotel rooms as commodities, and the cultural and price information logics at play, explain why Indian travelers favor friction in the search and booking process. While this paper is concerned with one specific commodity type, in one specific (albeit highly plural) market context, we conclude by outlining how we can generalize our analysis of bazaar behaviors to enrich our understanding of online commerce more widely.