Abstract: The strategic behavior that customers decide the purchase time based on the rational expectations will cause the supply chain (SC) difficulty in decision-making and affect tits profits. Consider a supply chain (SC) consisting of a manufacturer, a retailer and two kinds of customers with high or low willingness to pay (WTP), the centralized decision models and decentralized bi-level programming models of supply chain, when high WTP customers are strategic customers or myopic customers and the loss of stock-out is considered, are set up respectively by using the equilibrium analysis method and rational expectations theory. These four models are solved and the comparison analysis is performed as well as numerical emulation and sensitive analysis. The numerical examples prove the rationality of models and validity of conclusions. The study shows that when the high WTP customers are strategic customer, the centralized SC has higher order quantity, but lower profit of supply chain due to lower retail price comparing with the decentralized SC. The profits of decentralized SC and centralized SC with strategic high WTP customers are lower than those with myopic high WTP customers. The higher the unit loss of stock-out is, the more the order quantities are, but the less the profits of SCs are in each mode. The strategies such as selling with limited quantities, buying back the surplus products, improving the product value in the heart of customers and so on, can effectively reduce the affection of customer strategic behavior on SC. The theoretic research and management practice of SC are promoted based on customer strategic behavior.

Key words: customer strategic behavior, supply chain decision model, loss of stock-out, rational expectations equilibrium, pricing and ordering decisions