Plural forms versus franchise and company-owned systems:ADEA
approach of hotel chain performance

Laurent Botti , Walter Briec , Gérard Cliquet (1)

1 CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management

Plural form tends to be the most popular organization form in retail and service networks compared to purely franchised
or purely company-owned systems. In the first part, this paper exposes the evolution of researchers' state of mind from the
way of thinking which considers franchising and ownership as substitutable organizational forms to theories which analyze
the utilization of both franchise and company arrangements. The paper describes the main attempts to explain theoretically the
superiority of plural forms. In the second part, the paper discusses the hypothesis which says that there is a relationship between
the organizational form of the chain and its efficiency score. It is demonstrated through the application of a data envelopment
analysis method on French hotel chains that plural form networks are in average more efficient than strictly franchised and
wholly owned chains. The Kruskal–Wallis test which is a distribution-free rank-order statistic is used to statistically verify this
relationship. The result does not permit the rejection of the null hypothesis regarding whether an organizational form is more
efficient than another one. Hence, this paper opens prospects for researches aiming at testing the organizational form effect on
different samples and with other methods.

Mots clés: Franchise; Company-owned system; Plural form; DEA; Efficiency; Kruskal–Wallis

Domaines: Gestion et management

Laurent Botti, Walter Briec, Gérard Cliquet. Plural forms versus franchise and company-owned systems:ADEA
approach of hotel chain performance. Omega, 2009, 37, pp.566 - 578. ⟨halshs-00348088⟩