Outlet Ownership in Franchising Systems: An Agency Based Approach

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2002

Abstract

Building on prior agency theoretic explanations of the franchisor-franchisee relationship, this paper introduces the franchise system manager in the traditional dyadic channel. This allows the franchisors internal agency problems of providing incentives to managers to be linked to their external agency problems of acquiring and extracting rents from franchisees. The paper finds preliminary empirical support for this approach in a structural equations model estimated on a franchise system data set. It then develops and analyzes an agency-theoretic model with agency tradeoffs. An explicit rationale for mixed ownership in franchising emerges from the model, where the share of company owned outlets is endogenously determined as the tradeoff between franchisee rents and managerial compensation.

Discipline

Business

Research Areas

Operations Management

Publication

Managerial and Decision Economics

Volume

23

Issue

6

First Page

355

Last Page

369

ISSN

0143-6570

Identifier

10.1002/mde.1073

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS