Franchisors often modify the contract terms offered to prospective (new) franchisees – to incentivize growth in the number of franchisees, to access capital, or to improve their financial performance. We argue that changes in contract terms offered to new franchisees (contractual discrimination across franchisees) can alter existing franchisees’ perceived equity in their relationship with the franchisor, and affect their freeriding. Specifically, we hypothesize, and show, that positive (negative) discrimination towards new franchisees reduces (maintains) existing franchisees’ perceived equity in their relationship with the franchisor, motivating existing franchisees to increase (eschew) freeriding – with impact on franchisors’ performance. To do so, we first take advantage of an exogenous event (the great recession of 2007-09) to study how 120 restaurant franchisors changed their contract terms to new franchisees and how that affected their post-recession net income (Study 1). We show that changes in contracts for new franchisees impact franchisors’ post-crisis performance, as a function of the number of existing franchisees. Second, with two experiments (Studies 2 and 3) with entrepreneurs and franchisees, we document that the observed changes in performance occur because contractual discrimination affects existing franchisees’ perceived equity and their intentions to free-ride. Thus, we contribute to the literature on equity in franchising relationships, on contract evolution in franchising, and its impact on financial performance.

特许人经常修改提供给潜在（新）加盟商的合同条款——以激励加盟商数量的增长、获得资金或改善他们的财务业绩。我们认为，提供给新加盟商的合同条款的变化（加盟商之间的合同歧视）可以改变现有加盟商在与特许人的关系中的感知公平，并影响他们的搭便车。具体而言，我们假设并表明，对新加盟商的正面（负面）歧视会降低（维持）现有加盟商在与特许人的关系中的感知公平性，激励现有加盟商增加（避免）搭便车——从而影响特许人的绩效。为此，我们首先利用一个外生事件（2007-09 年的大衰退）来研究 120 家餐厅特许经营商如何将他们的合同条款更改为新的加盟商，以及这如何影响他们经济衰退后的净收入（研究 1）。我们表明，作为现有加盟商数量的函数，新加盟商合同的变化会影响加盟商的危机后绩效。其次，通过企业家和加盟商的两个实验（研究 2 和 3），我们记录了观察到的绩效变化是因为合同歧视影响了现有加盟商的感知公平和他们搭便车的意图。因此，我们为特许经营关系中的股权、特许经营中的合同演变及其对财务业绩的影响的文献做出贡献。