Suchergebnisse

The Uniform Sales Act was adopted by the legislature of the state of Washington m the extraordinary session of 1925. This act, patterned after similar legislation previously enacted in England, is designed to bring the law of the different states into conformity To effect this purpose the draughtsmen of the act largely codified the common law, but even where such a course was followed it is inevitable that the pre-existing law of some jurisdictions must be overruled. It is the purpose of the present discussion to consider the provisions of the Sales Act relative to implied warranty of quality in order to determine the proper interpretation to be given thereto, and then in the light of such principles to note the effect on the Washington law as previously announced by the Supreme Court of this state. Resort must be had for purposes of construction to the English and American cases construing the respective acts, since as yet no case involving this portion of the act has been decided in the state of Washington and the cases decided previously are in numerous instances valueless as authority under the Sales Act.

If consumers cannot discern quality prior to purchase, firms may use both court enforcement and the market mechanism to assure quality. But the level of warranty protection that firms choose to offer depends on the efficiency of the market. As the ability of consumers to communicate information concerning quality among themselves (market efficiency) increases, the level of warranty protection that maximizes consumer surplus falls. In highly efficient markets, producers do not offer a warranty. Thus, courts should not imply a warranty if producers do not specify one. In addition, the level of warranty protection depends on the courts' ability to distinguish between producer and consumer moral hazard.

AbstractA company wishes to estimate or predict its financial exposure in a reporting period of length T (typically one quarter) because of warranty claims. We propose a fairly general random measure model which allows computation of the Laplace transform of the total claim made against the company in the reporting interval due to warranty claims. When specialized to a Poisson process of both sales and warranty claims, statistical estimation of relevant quantities is possible. The methodology is illustrated by analyzing automobile sales and warranty claims data from a large car manufacturer for a single car model and model year. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008

AbstractThis article analyzes two general warranty policies involving an initial free replacement period, followed by a pro rata period. We examine the short‐run total costs and longrun average costs under these policies. Formulas for both consumer costs and manufacturer profits under warranty are derived. We also study the expected number of purchases over the product life cycle under both policies. Bounds for the expected total costs and expected number of purchases are obtained for the case where the failure distribution of the item is new better than used.

AbstractRecent years have seen a strong trend toward outsourcing warranty repair services to outside vendors. In this article we consider the problem of dynamically routing warranty repairs to service vendors when warranties have priority levels. Each time an item under warranty fails, it is sent to one of the vendors for repair. Items covered by higher priority warranty receive higher priority in repair service. The manufacturer pays a fixed fee per repair and incurs a linear holding cost while an item is undergoing or waiting for repair. The objective is to minimize the manufacturer's long‐run average cost. Because of the complexity of the problem, it is very unlikely that there exist tractable ways to find the optimal routing strategies. Therefore, we propose five heuristic routing procedures that are applicable to real‐life problems. We evaluate the heuristics using simulation. The simulation results show that the index‐based "generalized join the shortest queue" policy, which applies a single policy improvement step to an initial state‐independent policy, performs the best among all five heuristics. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008