Abstract: This paper considers three types of consumers:strategic consumers,inertia consumers,and bargain-hunters,in which strategic consumers are perfect rational and risk neutral,inertia consumers are bounded rational and implicit risk averse.Strategic and inertia consumers choosing inter-temporal purchase timing deteriorate mismatch risk between capacity and demand.We study the value of random rationing strategy by decreasing product availability to inducing more strategic and inertia consumers to purchase product early.Our results show that when strengthen of inertia of inertia consumers is lower,it's optimal strategy for seller to creating rationing risk to segment market under the former cases,whereas whether seller adopts random rationing strategy depends on both strengthen of inertia and flexible price discount under the latter cases.Then we compare these two operation management mechanisms through numerical study and find that value of flexible discount price mechanism is generally much greater when discount price is lower.

Key words: strategic consumer, random rationing, flexible discount price, rational expectation, fill rate