Contract Mixing in Franchising as a Mechanism for Public-Good Provision

This paper is concerned with the coexistence of company-owned units and franchised units in business format franchising and their different contractual arrangements. Drawing insights from case studies that indicate both the development and the maintenance of company-wide brand names and unit-specific sales activities are crucial to a franchise company, we construct a multitask model to account for such contract mixing in franchising. Intuitively, low-powered contracts are offered to some managers to induce effort for brand-name development and maintenance, while high-powered contracts are offered to the remaining managers to elicit sales activity and capture the beneficial effect of the company brand name. Franchising can thus be viewed as an organizational agreement for production involving brand-name products and services.