Right to Repair & Warranty

The most consequential R2R business story of recent weeks: John Deere agreed to pay $99 million to settle a 2022 class action lawsuit alleging the company monopolized repair services by withholding diagnostic software from farmers and independent repair shops. Beyond the dollar figure, Deere must also make repair tools available for at least a decade — which may prove more operationally significant than the settlement amount itself.

The core allegation was that Deere's proprietary Service ADVISOR software — available only to authorized dealers — gave the company a 100% market share over all repairs requiring that tool. This created what the FTC called "unfair steering": farmers were funneled toward Deere's dealer network not by preference but by software-enforced necessity. When equipment stopped working during planting or harvest windows, there was no alternative. U.S. PIRG estimated that repair restrictions across all agricultural manufacturers cost farmers $4.2 billion per year, making the $99M settlement look relatively modest.

The FTC's separate antitrust lawsuit — filed January 2025 under the Biden administration and joined by Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona — remains active. The Trump FTC has not dropped it. In mid-2025, a federal judge in Illinois rejected Deere's motion to dismiss, allowing the case to proceed. The discovery phase has since generated an unusual side dispute: Deere obtained court access to confidential competitive data from CNH Industrial, Kubota, and AGCO — companies drawn in as third parties — triggering an interlocutory appeal from AGCO to protect what it called its "crown jewels" of business information. The fight over third-party discovery may itself reshape competitive dynamics in the equipment industry.

Also worth noting: more than a dozen states introduced agricultural R2R bills in early 2025, following Colorado's 2023 law (the first agricultural R2R law in the U.S., effective January 2024). The legislative momentum is real even as the federal outcome remains uncertain.

The Broader R2R Landscape (April 2026)

• R2R legislation has been introduced in all 50 U.S. states. More than a quarter of Americans now live in a state with an enforceable R2R law covering at least some product categories.
• The REPAIR Act (H.R. 1566) for vehicles and the Fair Repair Act for consumer electronics are both under active Congressional consideration.
• SEMA uniquely advocates for a right to modify, not just repair — their concern centers on ADAS recalibration after vehicle customization, which OEMs currently control exclusively.
• The American Farm Bureau's voluntary MOU strategy (covering ~75% of U.S. agricultural machinery) did not prevent the Deere lawsuit, raising the question of when negotiated access agreements are substantively different from no agreement at all.
• The Repair Association's 2026 model legislation strengthens parts-pairing prohibitions — a central issue for electronics where software locks prevent third-party parts from functioning even when physically compatible.

Connection to My Research

The Deere case is directly relevant to my warranty-secondary market work. Traditional models treat warranties as quality signals or insurance mechanisms. But if a manufacturer controls the repair ecosystem through software, the warranty period's strategic scope expands: the firm controls not just the product sale but the entire post-sale service revenue stream. This raises a question worth developing further — is a longer warranty a credible quality signal when the manufacturer is also the monopolist in the repair market, or does it become a lock-in strategy?

Sources

• FTC press release, January 15, 2025 — FTC, Illinois & Minnesota v. Deere & Company.
• Farm Progress, April 2026 — Deere $99M class action settlement announcement.
• Investigate Midwest, July 2025 — Analysis of Judge Johnson's ruling rejecting Deere's motion to dismiss the FTC case.
• Right to Repair Summary (compiled April 2026) — Advocacy positions of SEMA, Auto Care Association, MEMA, Repair Association, iFixit, U.S. PIRG, and AFBF.

I'm starting this journal to track right-to-repair and warranty developments that connect to my research agenda. My 2022 M&SOM paper with Atasu and Tereyagoglu examined warranty length, product reliability, and secondary markets. The R2R movement is, in many ways, a live policy experiment in what happens when repair market access is actively contested — and the outcomes have direct implications for how we model warranty decisions and aftermarket competition.

The core operations question I keep returning to: when firms control the repair ecosystem — parts, software, diagnostic tools, authorized dealer networks — how does that change the strategic logic of warranty design? Traditional models treat warranty as a quality signal or a form of insurance for buyers. But when the manufacturer is also the monopolist in the repair market, warranty becomes part of a broader aftermarket revenue strategy. The product sale is the entry point; the service monopoly is where profits accumulate.

The Deere case is the clearest current example, but the same dynamic is visible across sectors: telematics and OBD data access in automotive, parts pairing in consumer electronics, software locks on FDA-cleared medical devices. I'll track developments across all of these, with a focus on what each case tells us about firm strategy and the operational consequences of repair market structure.