Featured Researcher: H.G. Parsa

H.G. Parsa

Each week, Daniels is featuring a researcher who conducts meaningful research that impacts their field and the wider community. Learn more about their work in Q&As with the Daniels Research team and email them to nominate yourself or a colleague for a future Q&A. 

H.G. Parsa is the Barron Hilton Professor of Lodging Management in the Fritz Knoebel School of Hospitality Management. He holds a PhD from Virginia Tech University. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research and Cornell Quarterly, and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar. Parsa’s research interests include corporate social responsibility and public policy, marketing and pricing strategies, and analysis of restaurant survival factors.

What do you study? 

I pioneered the topic of why restaurants fail back in 2005. My initial paper was downloaded 1,754 times in the first seven months. What was the big deal? Before my research, there was a commonly held belief in America that 90% of restaurants fail within the first year. But I came from the industry myself, and I went to the Ohio Restaurant Association and said, “That doesn’t make sense, and I’ve never seen this to be true.” An insurance institute perpetuated the 90% statistic to allow banks to charge a “high-risk” interest rate on restaurants, but they never had any data to support their claim. So, the Ohio Restaurant Association funded my research to investigate the topic. I tracked the restaurant industry data for four years and found that that statistic was nowhere close to being true, and the actual first-year failure rate was under 30%.  This research has become a “myth buster” paper and won the Best Published Paper Award from the International CHRIE. 

I duplicated this study with 10 years of data in different markets around the country and found the same thing: The failure rate was actually under 30%, which aligns with most other industries. So, I’ve published five papers in this series, and now I’m working on part six, focusing on one of the main contributors to restaurant failure: the rent factor. 

What are you working on currently? 

I’m also focusing on sustainability, hospitality, and public policy. My most recent paper looked at how green practices can be incentivized in the hospitality industry. Let’s take a hotel stay, for example. Perhaps the hotel engages in all kinds of green practices—energy and water saving practices, waste minimization, green laundry practices, etc. Those things are great, but they don’t really influence a customer’s decision about whether or not to stay at the hotel.  

However, you can see results if you give them ways to save money or even earn money through sustainable practices during their stay. There is a hotel in Asia, for example, where you can push a button in your room to adjust the temperature by five degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the season,  saving energy. If you choose to do this, they’ll give you a certain discount upon checkout. So, we’re investigating two modes of green incentives for hotel guests: pursuing an individual benefit (like saving money on the next visit) or appealing to the sense of public good (such as helping plant trees, supporting homeless shelters, donating to the national cancer causes, etc). Our results indicate that business/corporate guests prefer supporting a public cause, and individual and leisure guests prefer personal incentives. The paper was presented at an American Marketing Science conference.

How do you integrate your research into the classroom? 

I talk with my students on how to integrate green practices into their decision making. I discuss my research results and explain how restaurants can build sustainable practices in their business, whether plant-based foods or green to-go containers. In my revenue management class, I challenge students to identify sustainable practices and socially responsible pricing strategies that will bring additional revenues. These students are all studying different parts of hospitality—hotel management, restaurants, events, tourism, etc.—so they learn how these practices can apply to different industries.  

How would you like to see your work impact society? 

I am very passionate about sustainability. Right now, I’m also looking at organic waste management. Restaurants, banquet halls, hotels and caterers throw away tons of organic waste. As families, though, we throw away even more organic waste into the landfills than all those other categories, producing incredible amounts of methane gas. Why aren’t we composting everything that we can? So, I’m looking at biodigesters, which use enzymes to break down the material into water that can then be treated and used for other purposes. I want to make our world greener by starting here at Daniels in our waste management processes and looking at the broader local community and beyond. Why can’t we stop using single-use water bottles like many other universities? Why doesn’t Daniels encourage reusable coffee mugs (yes, you can have Daniels logo on them) and save thousands of paper cups going to landfills?