Unlike institutional investors, who have expertise in collecting and analyzing firm information to predict firms’ future performance, individual investors have a limited ability to conduct this task. Therefore, individual investors are known to commonly rely on financial analysts’ earnings forecasts, which are freely available to them. However, as demonstrated by numerous studies, financial analysts’ forecasts are not always accurate and free from bias. Drawing on screening theory and the innate financial and structural differences between highly franchised restaurants and their less franchised peers, the current study showed that analysts provide more accurate and less optimistically biased forecasts for the former than the latter. However, the positive impact of an additional number of analysts on the accuracy of forecasts was weaker for the former than the latter. The current study can help individual investors in the restaurant industry improve their understanding of financial analysts’ earnings forecasts and make better-informed investment decisions.

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特许经营对金融分析师盈利预测可靠性的影响：来自美国上市餐饮公司的证据

机构投资者拥有收集和分析公司信息以预测公司未来业绩的专业知识，而个人投资者与此不同，个人投资者执行这项任务的能力有限。因此，众所周知，个人投资者通常依赖金融分析师的盈利预测，而这些预测是免费提供给他们的。然而，正如大量研究表明的那样，金融分析师的预测并不总是准确且没有偏见。目前的研究利用筛选理论以及高度特许经营的餐厅与较少特许经营的同行之间固有的财务和结构差异，表明分析师为前者提供的预测比后者更准确且不那么乐观。然而，额外数量的分析师对前者预测准确性的积极影响弱于后者。目前的研究可以帮助餐饮业的个人投资者提高对金融分析师盈利预测的理解，并做出更明智的投资决策。