Bidirectional technological spillover in the Chinese star-rated hotel sector: An empirical investigation

The star-rated hotel sector has played an increasing role in Chinese economic development. A feature of this sector is the technology-gap between high- and low-end hotels, which may generate spillover through different channels: such as human capital mobility and management systems. High-end hotels are technological leaders with better access to technology, foreign connections, and government policy support, while low-end hotels have better localized knowledge and expertise. Therefore, it is important to see whether there is spillover between high- and low-end hotels. Two contributions of our paper are to model hotels as multi-service decision-makers, and to rely on a nonparametric empirical strategy. The results show that high-end hotels are the major spillover generators moving the star-rated hotel sector to better performance. On the other hand, low-end hotels not only integrate the technological knowledge from high-end hotels, but also share their experience of local knowledge.