Optimal repair-cost limit for a consumer following expiry of a warranty

This paper develops a methodology for obtaining the optimalrepair-cost limit for the repair-replace decision that a consumerfaces on the expiry of a product warranty, where the producthas been minimally repaired on failure during the warranty.Three cases are considered; (i) an exponentially distributedtime to failure with an arbitrary repair-cost distribution,(ii) an exponentially distributed time to failure with a uniformrepair-cost distribution, and (iii) a Weibull-distributed timeto failure with a beta-distributed repair cost. Numerical optimizationsare performed for the third case, and conclusions drawn as tothe sensitivity of the optimal repair-cost limit on the parametervalues of the distributions involved.