United Electric (UE) sells refrigerators for $400 with a 1-year warranty. The warranty works as follows. If any part of the refrigerator fails during the first year after purchase, UE replaces the refrigerator for an average cost of $100. As soon as a replacement is made, another 1-year warranty period begins for the customer. If a refrigerator fails outside the warranty period, we assume that the customer immediately purchases another UE refrigerator. Suppose that the amount of time a refrigerator lasts follows a normal distribution with a mean of 1.8 years and a standard deviation of 0.3 year.
a. Estimate the average profit per year UE earns from a customer.
b. How could the approach of this problem be used to determine the optimal warranty period?
Already registered? Login
Not Account? Sign up
Enter your email address to reset your password
Back to Login? Click here