CEDP Research Seminar will welcome Ulrich Laitenberger
We are pleased to announce that Ulrich Laitenberger (Tilburg) will be the next speaker in our CEDP Research Seminar. The seminar will take place Thursday (not Wednesday this time), September 17, 2026 at 4 PM in Salle L108.
Ulrich Laitenberger will present his paper:
Franchising Defrosts: The Impact of Ownership Structure on Service Availability
Product and service availability are critical drivers of sales and customer satisfaction, yet often suffer from operational breakdowns. In highly standardized service environments, retail ownership structure can significantly shape the operational incentives required to prevent and resolve these execution failures. To quantify this, this paper examines how retail ownership structure influences service availability within franchised systems, using McDonald’s ice cream machines as a uniquely standardized empirical setting. Leveraging data from McBroken.com, McDonald’s franchise disclosure documents, hiring records, and Advan (SafeGraph) visitation metrics for over 11,000 U.S. locations (2021-2025), we employ a difference-indifferences framework to assess the impact of ownership transitions on equipment downtime. We find that the same restaurants, when franchised, experience a 10.4 percentagepoint reduction in machine unavailability and 60% shorter durations of unavailability compared to when they were company-owned. Furthermore, franchising improves availability more in historically underperforming restaurants, suggesting franchisees add value through adaptive problem-solving and stronger incentives to resolve disruptions. Analysis of Google reviews indicates that this operational responsiveness enhances customer ratings without compromising overall service quality. Finally, recent Right to Repair (R2R) regulations modestly improve availability for franchised restaurants, highlighting how local autonomy benefits from relaxed technological constraints. This study contributes to the service operations literature by quantifying how ownership incentives and local discretion shape service performance in highly standardized service environments.