Dr. Francine Lafontaine Receives 2022 RIFC | ISoF Eminent Franchising Scholar Award
Francine Lafontaine
Francine Lafontaine, Ph.D., has been named the 2022 Rosenberg International Franchise Center | ISoF Eminent Franchising Scholar at the 35th Annual ISoF Conference in June. Francine currently serves as Interim Dean of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, having also served as Senior Associate Dean at Ross for several years.
She is the William Davidson Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at Ross. She holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Economics in LS&A at the University of Michigan and is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, UK. She served as Director of the Bureau of Economics at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2014-2015. Francine was President of the Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics in 2018-19, and President of the Society of Industrial Organization in 2010-12.
With respect to ISOF, Dr. Lafontaine served as Program Chair in 1997-98, and as Advisory Board Member from 2007-2014. Her research focuses on inter-firm contracting, with a special focus on franchise contracting. Francine is interested more generally in understanding vertical contractual arrangements used in procurement and distribution and associated public policy issues. Dr. Lafontaine also studies the effects of contracting practices on firm performance, as well as issues surrounding business creation and survival in retail and small-scale service industries more generally.
Several of her articles have appeared in top journals in economics, including the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, the Journal of Political Economy, the RAND Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. Her monograph, The Economics of Franchising (with Roger Blair), was published in 2005 by Cambridge University Press, with a new edition released in 2011. Dr. Lafontaine edited a volume entitled Franchise Contracting and Organization that was published by Edward Elgar in 2005. Professor Lafontaine holds a PhD in Economics from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and an MSc in Applied Economics and BBA from Ecole des Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) at the Université de Montréal, in Canada. Francine also holds an honorary doctorate from the Université de Rennes 1, in Brittany, France.
