フランチャイズビジネスにおける最適契約～商品の廃棄を考慮したロイヤルティ形態の比較～

抄録

This paper analyzes the optimum form of royalty structures between sales-based royalties (SBR) and margin-based royalties (MBR) in franchise business. A choice of the royalty structure obviously affects expected revenues for both franchisors and franchisees. We mainly investigate the effect of a franchisee's option to claim refunds under demand uncertainty. Given the royalty structure, on the one hand, the franchisee chooses the order quantity of goods to maximize the franchisee's expected profit. On the other hand the franchisor, which anticipates the franchisee's decision, can determine a transfer price of the goods to maximize the franchisor's profit. In this paper we formalize this relation as an optimization problem and analyze the solution. Our analysis reveals that (i) franchisors should choose the MBR in the presence of the demand uncertainty, (ii) the existence of the option to claim refunds has a non-negative impact on the franchisee's profit, especially when the volatility of the demand is high. We also conduct sensitivity analyses to examine the effect of each parameter on the expected profits for franchisors.