Oh no! That was too Sudden: Role of Sudden Product-Failures in Repair-Intentions
(A2025-126233)

AUTHORS

Aruna Tatavarthy, NHH Norwegian School of Economics; Nidhi Agrawal, Foster School of Business, University of Washington; Helge Thorbjørnsen, Norwegian School of Economics & SNF (Center for Applied Research at NHH)

ABSTRACT

Prolonging product ownership is an important for sustainable consumption and lifestyle. However, with deteriorations in product quality, users now experience more product failures during their ownership period. Despite the self-reported intentions to repair their broken products, consumers throw away or discard their failing products instead of repairing them. What explains such responses to product failures? The current research examines when and why product owners prefer to get their broken products repaired. To do so, we first distinguish between two types of product failures - sudden vs. gradual and investigate its impact on product repair decisions. Across three experiments we demonstrate that users are significantly more likely to repair their failed products if they witness a sudden (vs. gradual) failure. We also show that this effect is primarily because users experience guilt from anticipated product waste or leaving the product unrepaired. We examine other alternative explanations and demonstrate the presence of boundary conditions via repair cost information. Finally, we elaborate on the substantive and theoretical contributions.