Platforms provide efficient mechanisms for firms to acquire new customers, unfortunately owing to ease of use these platforms (usually with high transaction costs / commissions) also often cannibalize existing customers from lower cost firm-direct selling channels. Using hotels and online travel agents (OTAs) as the backdrop this thesis aims to investigate firm pricing strategies under different market conditions. Hotels often use price advantages to entice direct versus 3rd party transactions with platforms moving away from price parity or most-favored-nation clauses to rank dimming or price-based preferential sort as means to encourage competitive platform prices. Using a classic duopolistic setting, we find that unless consumers are price inelastic, a price-based ranking does not affect hotel profit. Furthermore, we prove that if hotels are not constrained by capacity, price parity clauses would almost always cause prices to be higher, while the effect on hotel profit would depend on the price elasticity of consumers booking through OTAs.