Product repair is a suggested post-purchase activity toward extending the useful lifespan of a product. However, repairability has not received sufficient attention by manufacturers. Even if the product repairability is not explicitly claimed by manufacturers, it is expected by consumers, thereby impacting their loyalty and future purchase recommendations. In this paper, the impact of consumers' product repair experiences on their future purchase and recommendation decisions is investigated. The study is based on a survey consisting of 8403 consumers who have had personal repair experiences in year 2013. A bivariate ordered probit model is used to estimate two correlated variables that jointly represent the future product sale, namely 'consumer future purchase decision' and 'purchase recommendations to friends and family'. It was found out that predictor factors such as usefulness of repair information, complexity of repair and consumers' willingness to repair a broken product have significant effect on the future purchase decisions and recommendations.
Consumer electronics are turning into consumable devices nowadays, and consumers generally show little inclination to repair broken products due to the lack of repair infrastructures and relative high repair costs. On the other hand, technical, operational, and economic barriers impede the growth of repair businesses. In this paper, we provide a look into the repair industry through an analysis of a survey conducted by a third-party repair service provider. 2170 repair technicians have participated in a survey consisting of 23 questions about repair challenges in their profession. At first, we take a look at the economic barriers that dissuade consumers from repairing products. Next, a demand-based repair service pricing framework is introduced. The optimal pricing levels are found based on the consumers' repair demand. Finally, other aspects of repair businesses, e.g. repairability degree of consumer electronics and consumer expectations of repair services, are thoroughly investigated. As an example of findings, different types of consumer electronics are clustered based on the associated repair difficulties. Moreover, some insights are provided to promote the repair businesses.
Despite various efforts to shed light on thedifferent aspects of repair and maintenanceprocesses, almost all of our (our entire) understanding ofthe repair practices done on consumer electronics comes from either themanufactures or professional repair experts. There is a lack of systematic, well-documented studies of repair practices by unprofessional individual consumers. Understanding the factors contributing to unprofessional repair practices is a necessity to lengthen the life span of the product and to promote repair as an eco-behavior among individual consumers. We have investigated 4210 break and fix narratives reported by consumers of electronic devices in a survey conducted by iFixit.com-a wiki-based website for repair manuals-in order to apperceive the most common failures, repair practices and challenges that individual users face in their interactive experiences with product repair. A comprehensive text mining set up has been applied to extract the most frequent product break stories and their causes of failure. Regression analyses have been employed to examine the possible links between consumer experiences of repairing electronics and their future purchase behaviors.The results of analyses indicate that in addition to the consumers' attitude toward repair, various product design features offer different levels of repair convenience, which may eventually impact the consumer's future purchase decisions.
In this paper, a data set of Lithium-ion (Li-ion) laptop batteries has been studied with the aim of investigating the potential reusability of laptop batteries. This type of rechargeable batteries is popular due to their energy efficiency and high reliability. Therefore, understanding the life cycle of these batteries and improving the recycling process is becoming increasingly important. The reusability assessment is linked to the consumer behavior and degradation process simultaneously through monitoring the performance of batteries over their life cycle. After capturing the utilization behavior, the stability time of batteries is approximately derived. The stability time represents the interval that a battery works normally without any significant drop in performance. Consequently, the Reusability Likelihood of batteries is quantified using the number of cycles that the battery can be charged with the aim of facilitating future remarketing and recovery opportunities.
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