EXPRESS: Surviving Economic Adversity: Governance of Franchise Clusters
研究了经济逆境下特许经营集群中两种治理机制（加盟商所有权分散与特许人现场监督）对门店生存的影响，发现所有权分散在密集集群中降低失败风险，而现场监督则增加风险。
Despite research on clustering strategies in franchised systems, little is known about its impact on outlet survival during times of economic adversity. In this research, we identify two governance mechanisms used by franchisors that vary at a cluster- or outlet-level – franchisee ownership fragmentation and franchisor on-site supervision – and develop a framework to suggest the efficacy of these mechanisms in mitigating the negative effect of economic adversity on the survival of franchised outlets operating in a cluster. We test our framework using a novel clustering algorithm and survival analysis on a uniquely constructed dataset of 8,677 outlets across 18 franchisors over 14 years. We find that when economic conditions deteriorate, franchisee ownership fragmentation, which reflects greater diversity in cluster composition and knowledge sources, reduces franchised outlet failure hazard within denser clusters. In contrast, franchisor on-site supervision, which denotes lower franchisee autonomy, intensifies outlet failure hazard in such clusters. Our research offers actionable insights for franchisors on managing in-cluster outlets during economic adversity and introduces FranClusterer , a practical app-based tool for cluster identification and governance.