How Competing Platform Actors Frame a Disruptive Technology: A Dyadic Analysis of Generative-AI Risk Disclosure by Hotels and Online Travel Agencies
Yonghee Kim, Shi-Shiuan Wang, Sungjin YooHotel executives publicly describe generative AI (GenAI) as their route out of dependence on online travel agencies (OTAs), while OTAs treat the same technology as a threat to be absorbed. The emerging disclosure literature cannot detect this opposition because it pools structurally heterogeneous firms into a single cross-section. This paper asks whether hotels and OTAs frame GenAI differently in their mandatory risk disclosures, and how those frames evolve. This paper analyzes SEC annual-report risk-factor disclosures (FY2019–2025) from a matched dyad of four hotel operators and three OTAs—49 filings, on Form 10-K and, for one foreign private issuer, Form 20-F—combining keyword-anchored extraction, manual thematic coding, cross-firm cosine similarity, and reproducibility-tested stance coding. Three findings emerge. GenAI language is dyadically differentiated in theme: rival-capability framing is exclusive to the OTA side (11 of 51 OTA passages versus none of 24 operator passages), while operator language is dominated by deployment-liability and compliance content (58 versus 28 percent). Firm-specific language nonetheless converges toward common legalistic phrasing within three reporting cycles. And stance is threat-leaning from the moment GenAI enters these filings and intensifies thereafter: threat framing accounts for roughly two-thirds of stance-bearing passages in FY2023 and rises to almost ninety percent by FY2025, while opportunity framing stays flat. The single seven-firm dyad yields illustrative rather than generalizable findings. Yet rivals’ annual filings are public, auditable competitive intelligence: OTAs now name supplier-direct and AI-mediated discovery as threats—precisely the opening hotels pursue. A disruptive technology, this evidence suggests, is not merely disclosed but strategically framed from opposing structural positions, and the intensity of its threat framing tracks its competitive salience.