가맹사업의 투명성과 정보공개제도에 관한 연구

Corporate transparency refers to the adequate and prompt disclosure of corporate information to stakeholders such as shareholders, creditors, and employees, and in Korea, the problem of opacity emerged as a major issue after the 1997 IMF financial crisis. In the middle of franchise business, opportunistic behavior to exploit the asymmetrical position between franchisors and franchisees can cause side effects such as franchisors not disclosing information properly or providing false information to franchisees. Transparency in the franchise business means the timely disclosure of sufficient information about the franchise business, so the legal system that ensures transparency is the information disclosure and false and exaggerated advertising regulations. It is a fact that the franchise act operated in many countries such as the United States and Japan are basically centered on information disclosure. An intuitive way for improving transparency is to strengthen this information disclosure duty. However, there is no particular problem with the franchise regulations in Korea, and the same is true in terms of comparative law. In other words, the information itself, which is the basic premise of transparency, is already provided to franchisees sufficiently, but if they cannot properly interpret the information and grasp the implications, the effectiveness of the information disclosure will be greatly reduced. Therefore it is necessary to institutionally support franchisees to receive individual legal services from lawyers. Of course, it is not an easy decision to decide whether or not to hire of lawyers, as it is a matter of autonomous decision, and supporting the hiring of lawyers entails considerable costs. However, in recent years, many policies have been implemented to support the assistance of lawyers, such as the village lawyer system, and the school lawyer system in particular seems to be a meaningful reference case.