are not a good gauge, because most of the business failures
in restaurant franchise systems are never reported out of the
fear of brand dilution and potential negative impact on a
franchise system. Rather than risk a record of failure, franchisers
take a proactive stance and either buy back troubling
franchises or resell them to another franchisee without ever
reporting to a bankruptcy court system (MauMau 2009). As
a result, most of the business failures in the restaurant
industry are underreported in official legal documents of the
bankruptcy courts. Thus, to overcome the limitations of the
many definitions of success and failure, we have used the
definition that was successfully used by earlier studies on
this topic, where a business failure is defined as a change in
business ownership of an existing business irrespective of
the reasons behind the ownership turnover. This definition
was adapted from the earlier studies on this topic by Watson
and Everett (1996b), Parsa et al. (2005), Parsa et al. (2011),
and other studies where business failure was defined as
change in ownership as reported in local health department
records. This countenances, for example, the situation of a
restaurateur who is adept at starting a business, but may not
be able to run the restaurant once it is launched.