A buyer exposed to a stockout may lose goodwill and be less inclined to select the same supplier in his next procurement. Reversely, an in-stock experience may restore the supplier’s prospect of being selected in the future. What should the supplier’s inventory control policy be in this situation? To address this question, we develop a multiperiod model of a buyer who selects a supplier with a probability that depends on the supplier’s rating. This rating reflects the buyer’s goodwill towards the supplier based on past service, measured in terms of in-stock/out-of-stock incidents, and is updated by the buyer after each service. The supplier’s optimal inventory policy partitions the inventory space in order-up-to and do-not-order intervals for each rating. The optimal decision depends on whether ordering reduces the supplier’s risk of being downgraded enough to offset the increase in her ordering and inventory costs. We derive and evaluate bounds on the optimal policy and expose some of its properties. We obtain conditions for the optimality of basestock policies and show that such policies are optimal if there are only two ratings or if the buyer’s demand is constant. Using our model, we impute the stockout cost in a newsvendor setting. Numerical experiments suggest that (i) the supplier may benefit from holding more inventory in intermediate than in extreme ratings, and from dealing with a buyer who responds less erratically to service, (ii) basestock policies are efficient, and (iii) using an arbitrary stockout cost in the newsvendor setting can significantly hurt profits.

面临缺货的买家可能会失去商誉，并且在下一次采购中不太愿意选择同一供应商。相反，有库存的体验可能会恢复供应商在未来被选中的前景。在这种情况下，供应商的库存控制政策应该是什么？为了解决这个问题，我们开发了一个买方选择供应商的多期模型，其概率取决于供应商的评级。该评级反映了买方基于过去服务对供应商的善意，以库存/缺货事件衡量，并由买方在每次服务后更新。供应商的最佳库存策略将库存空间划分为每个等级的订购时间间隔和不订购时间间隔。最佳决策取决于订购是否可以降低供应商被降级的风险，足以抵消其订购和库存成本的增加。我们推导出和评估最优策略的界限，并揭示它的一些属性。我们获得了基础油政策最优性的条件，并表明如果只有两个评级或买方的需求是恒定的，则此类政策是最优的。使用我们的模型，我们估算报摊设置中的缺货成本。数值实验表明，(i) 供应商可能会受益于在中间评级中持有比极端评级更多的库存，以及与对服务反应较少的买家打交道，(ii) 基本库存政策是有效的，以及 (iii) 使用任意报摊设置中的缺货成本会严重损害利润。