Pricing and offering strategies for multi-product manufacturer’s extended warranties under agency selling
研究了多产品制造商在代理销售模式下，是否在平台提供延长保修以及采用统一或渠道特定定价策略的问题，推导出最优提供条件。
Consider a manufacturer distributing multiple products through an independent platform using an agency selling model. For each product, the manufacturer offers an extended warranty, which is available on the manufacturer’s website. We focus on the decision of whether to offer some of these warranties on the platform alongside the products, considering two different pricing strategies: uniform and channel-specific. Under uniform pricing, we demonstrate that for each extended warranty, the price is set so that its markup equals the manufacturer’s profit share plus the expected profit from selling the warranty. Furthermore, the optimal price for each product decreases as the profit from selling the associated extended warranty increases. Building on these pricing decisions, we derive two key conditions: the first helps determine which extended warranties should be made available on the platform, while the second assesses whether introducing an additional warranty to the platform would be beneficial. By applying these conditions, the manufacturer can develop an optimal strategy for offering extended warranties. Under channel-specific pricing, we find that each extended warranty can generate a positive profit margin for the manufacturer, regardless of the channel through which it is sold. Furthermore, the manufacturer always prefers to offer all extended warranties on both the platform and the website, maximizing profitability across both channels.