About MY Research
Research Motivation
I research topics that intersect service operations and marketing with a particular interest in franchise relationships. In line with the mission of the Cecil B. Day School of Hospitality and the Robinson College of Business, I focus on empirical work that helps inform hospitality practice. The goal of my research is to contribute in a meaningful way to theory building yet provide insight for hospitality practitioners in managing the distribution and consumption of their services.
Research Relevance
My work on franchising informs a greater understanding of this complex relationship, a dominant form of distribution of hospitality based products. Two important trends having a significant impact on the consumption of hospitality services are the rise and influence of co-creation and service innovation fueled by technological advances and cultural changes. My work in the areas of co-creation and service innovation address both important trends.
Research Philosophy
I believe in interdisciplinary work that crosses boundaries and helps inform practice. By design, my co-authors reside in varying disciplines. They help me view research questions from new perspectives and contribute a great deal to my educational journey as a researcher. For an exemplary example of such collaboration click on "The FDD Project" button.
scholarly research
Production and Operations Management
Production and Operations Management
Production and Operations Management
With a panel data set of 3,500 franchised U.S. hotel properties we find that franchisee dependence moderates the impact of three unique types of investments.
Journal of Operations Management
Production and Operations Management
Production and Operations Management
We examine the effects of a franchisee’s size, distance from headquarters, and local competition on voluntary compliance with corporate brand-building initiatives at the outlet level.
Journal of Advertising
Production and Operations Management
Industrial Marketing Management
We investigate how different types of franchised outlets, each targeting a different customer segment, moderate the effects of various advertising expenditures on unit-level profitability.
Industrial Marketing Management
Industrial Marketing Management
Industrial Marketing Management
Results from a four-year multi-method research project, including ethnographic and survey data, point to the salience of brand relationships and their importance to channel management.
Industrial Marketing Management
Industrial Marketing Management
Industrial Marketing Management
We propose a model that expands the conceptualization of governance in franchising that acknowledges traditionally ignored stakeholders, including debt and equity holders.
Journal of Business Ethics
Industrial Marketing Management
Industrial Marketing Management
In a series of four experiments we find that donating to checkout charity, licenses consumers to engage in the consumption of “guilty pleasures”.
Journal of Operations Management
International Journal of Research in Marketing
Journal of Operations Management
In this article, we develop a professional service life cycle model to describe the changes in professional work over time.
Journal of Operations Management
International Journal of Research in Marketing
Journal of Operations Management
We find that franchisees charge higher prices than their corporate counterparts even when controlling for operational performance.
International Journal of Research in Marketing
International Journal of Research in Marketing
International Journal of Research in Marketing
This study examines to what extent social media hurts a company’s shareholder value in the event of a product recall.
Service Science
Journal of Advertising
International Journal of Research in Marketing
We demonstrate that increases in a hotel’s online reputation score are related to an increase in RevPAR. Naturally occurring differences in the heterogeneity of different hotels moderates the relationship between review score and performance.
Journal of Retailing
Journal of Advertising
Journal of Advertising
This article reveals that successful franchisee associations help manage the inherent tension that exists between cooperation and conflict in franchise relationships using a distinctive yet adaptive organizational identity.
Journal of Advertising
Journal of Advertising
Journal of Advertising
This four-part multimethod investigation into the phenomenon of consumer generated
advertising establishes a performance advantage over traditional advertising and suggests a rationale for this differential.
ON going Projects
A Longitudinal Assessment of Routine Compliance
We empirically investigate the role of corporate attempts to “renew” outlet compliance with CSR initiatives; (2) parse the post-renewal compliance decay into immediate and protracted constituent forms; and (3) address open questions of whether and how a location’s contextual operating conditions may exacerbate or mitigate decay and renewals.
Collaborator: Brett Massimino and Jie Zhang
Charity at Checkout an Empirical Examination
We investigate how an outlet’s strategic emphasis on checkout charity types affects their customer engagement. The moderating effects of the outlet’s relational interdependence and community involvement are also tested using a three-year panel data set of over 1,000 franchised restaurants.
Collaborators: Brett Massimino and Jie Zhang
A Systematic Framework for Analysis of FDDs
We provide a step-by-step guide by which researchers can acquire, clean and pre-process, extract features and apply learning-based models or neural networks in natural language processing to franchise disclosure documents. Our process offers franchising, legal, and B2B scholars a template to utilize advances in artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled natural language processing to enrich current research agendas.
Collaborator: Yanqing Wang and Yinghao Pan