Distributions of manufacturer's and user's replacement costs under warranty

Abstract

We derive and compute time-dependent distributions of replacement costs under warranty over the product life cycle, both for the manufacturer and the user, under conditional pro-rata and nonrenewing free-replacement warranty policies. For pro-rata warranties, the analysis is based on the joint distribution of the number of replacements and the user's cost over time. For free-replacement warranties, distribution of the user's cost follows from the observation that replacement points outside warranty periods form a renewal process. This property is also exploited to determine the distribution of the manufacturer's cost. We apply our findings to measure the impact of product conformance quality on warranty cost distributions and find that manufacturer's cost measures are more sensitive to changes in quality than user's cost measures. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.