Right to Repair Won't Play Out the Way Shops Expect, a Management Science Model Warns
ServiceMag Staff
ServiceMag editorial staff covering the appliance and HVAC trade.
Right to Repair Won't Play Out the Way Shops Expect, a Management Science Model Warns
Connecticut's right-to-repair law takes effect July 1, adding another state to a list that already includes California, Minnesota, Colorado, New York, and Oregon. For independent appliance and electronics shops, the legislative momentum looks like a straightforward win. A 2023 paper in Management Science argues the economics are messier than the politics.
Chen Jin and Cungen Zhu of the National University of Singapore, with Luyi Yang of UC Berkeley, built the first formal analytical model of what right-to-repair laws actually do to a market. Their setup is a long-running game between a profit-maximizing manufacturer and a mix of consumers who can buy new, buy used on a secondary market, or fix a failed product through either the manufacturer or an independent shop. The legislation enters the model as what it is in practice: a drop in the cost of independent repair, since parts, tools, and documentation get cheaper to source.
Manufacturers in the model don't absorb that change quietly.
When production costs sit in an intermediate range, the manufacturer's price response is non-monotone, meaning it reverses direction as repair keeps getting cheaper. At first the firm pursues what the authors call a volume strategy: it cuts new-product prices to make replacement more tempting than a fix. Push independent repair costs low enough, though, and the firm flips to a margin strategy, raising new-product prices while throwing in free repair to stretch the product's lifetime value.
Read those two moves again from behind a service counter. One puts a cheaper new unit next to your repair quote. The other puts a free OEM repair next to it.
What the model says about welfare and the environment
The welfare results cut against slogans on both sides of the debate. Depending on production costs, the authors show right to repair can be a win for consumers and a loss for the environment, the reverse, or a loss for both. When production is cheap, consumers come out ahead but environmental impact rises, because cheaper new products mean more units get built. In the intermediate-cost range, the paper identifies a possible lose-lose-lose, with manufacturer profit, consumer surplus, and environmental outcomes all declining at once.
None of this makes the laws bad policy. A model isolates one mechanism, OEM pricing, and holds the rest of the world still. It doesn't capture a rural customer getting a fridge fixed in two days instead of waiting two weeks on an authorized servicer, and it doesn't model the independent shop's books at all.
What it does establish is that OEMs have rational pricing countermoves, and anyone betting a business on these laws should expect to see them.
Reading the board as the laws spread
The practical watch list for shop owners follows straight from the model. Keep an eye on entry-level pricing in the categories you service most; a quiet price cut on base-model washers changes your repair-versus-replace math more than any statute does. Watch for manufacturers bundling extended service or free repair into the sale, which is the margin strategy wearing a warranty costume. And track which brands loosen parts access willingly, because the model's logic suggests they've already worked out how to recapture the value.
Statehouses keep moving regardless. Our rundown of right-to-repair laws in 2026 covers the state-by-state map, California's SB 244 remains the template most states copy, and Europe went further with the repair obligations we covered in our EU right-to-repair directive analysis.
Cheaper parts and real documentation are still worth having. The Jin, Yang, and Zhu paper just retires the assumption that access alone decides who profits. Shops that win under these laws will be the ones competing on turnaround, trust, and proximity — the things a manufacturer can't reprice from a boardroom.
Source
Jin, C., Yang, L., & Zhu, C. (2023). "Right to Repair: Pricing, Welfare, and Environmental Implications." Management Science, 69(2). https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4401