Making a Motivated Manager: A Census Data Investigation into Efficiency Differences Between Franchisee and Franchisor-Owned Restaurants
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-54
Abstract
While there has been significant research on the reasons for franchising, little work has examined the effects of franchising on establishment performance. This paper attempts to fill that gap. We use restricted-access US Census Bureau microdata from the 2007 Census of Retail Trade to examine establishment-level productivity of franchisee- and franchisor-owned restaurants. We do this by employing a two-stage data envelopment analysis model where the first stage uses DEA to measure each establishment's efficiency. The DEA efficiency score is then used as the second-stage dependent variable. The results show a strong and robust effect attributed to franchisee ownership for full service restaurants, but a smaller and insignificant difference for limited service restaurants. We believe the differences in task programability between limited and full service restaurants results in a very different role for managers/franchisees and is the driving factor behind the different results.
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sale,
organizational,
establishment,
development,
consumer,
franchising,
franchise,
franchisor,
restaurant,
customer,
franchise establishments
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National Science Foundation,
Center for Economic Studies,
Ordinary Least Squares,
Total Factor Productivity,
Census of Retail Trade,
Economic Census,
American Community Survey,
Business Register,
United States Census Bureau,
International Trade Research Report
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