摘要：A product warranty is an agreement offered by a producer to a consumer
to replace or repair a faulty item, or to partially or fully reimburse
the consumer in the event of a failure. Warranties are very
widespread and serve many purposes, including protection for producer,
seller, and consumer. They are used as signals of quality and
as elements of marketing strategies. In this study we review the notion
of an online convex optimization algorithm and its variations,
and apply it in warranty context. We introduce a class of profit functions,
which are functions of warranty, and use it to formulate the
problem of maximizing the company's profit over time as an online
convex optimization problem. We use this formulation to present an
approach to setting the warranty based on an online algorithm with
low regret. Under a dynamic environment, this algorithm provides
a warranty strategy for the company that maximises its profit over
time.
