Choosing contracts to support ALFO strategy: Insights from comparing franchised and managed hotels
研究了酒店业中特许经营与管理合同两种组织形式的绩效差异，发现管理合同更适合高端酒店，而特许经营更适合大型酒店，基于467家西班牙酒店的数据支持了这些论点。
Although franchise and management contracts constitute the dominant way of organizing business-to-business relationships within hotel chains, no study has compared their relative performance. This paper aims to explain their differences and assess their impact on online scores, currently a key performance indicator in the hotel industry. We argue that franchises are less effective than management contracts for operating upscale hotels due to the relative advantages that the latter have in transferring and enforcing tacit knowledge, typically embedded in skilled staff and very relevant in such quality-tier hotels. Conversely, franchising is better for large hotels because, first, its incentive structure better addresses managerial shirking (typically more severe as hotel size increases) and, second, it offers advantages when the standardization of business procedures is key to success (as is true for large establishments). Our empirical findings broadly support these arguments in a dataset of 467 Spanish hotels, also providing evidence that no single organizational solution fits all situations.