Abstract: Strategic customer behavior is verified to bring about great impacts on firms' profits. The value of demand learning on the strategic customer behavior is discussed by formulating a game model of a two-period decentralized supply chain consisting of one manufacturer, one retailer and a group of customers, in which customers are divided into two types:myopic customer and strategic customer. The impacts of demand learning on pricing and order policies as well as the whole performance of the supply chain are analyzed by mathematical models and numerical studies. The main results are as follows:Firstly, the retailer always prefers to gain demand update information no matter what types of customers are. In addition, the manufacturer does not prefer to gain demand update information when selling to myopic customers while prefers to gain demand update information when selling to strategic customers. Finally, demand learning helps to improve both the retailer's profit and the supply chain's profit, especially, when customers are strategic, supply chain's profit is enhanced more greatly by demand learning. In summary, a conclusion can be drawed that demand learning can reduce negative impacts from the strategic customer behavior and improve firms' performance effectively.

Key words: strategic customer behavior, demand learning, supply chain, stackelberg game