Analyzing the impact of panic purchasing and customer behavior on customer purchasing decisions and retailer strategies during disruption.

Due to various disasters and catastrophic phenomena, we have seen different disruptions in goods supply in recent years. Such disruptions usually create a level of panic among the people. Besides this panic, the communications and interactions of people with each other affect their purchasing behavior. Our paper investigates the panic effect on the customers’ demand and retailer’s profit by considering social learning and updating customer's beliefs. Based on our findings, the retailer’s optimal strategy can be determined by the customers’ purchasing decisions. Our results show that in high level and low level of panic intensity exploitation of social learning tools and techniques is not recommended for the retailer, whether the warehouse capacity of the retailer is large or small. In the mid-range level of panic intensity, the retailer should exploit social learning tools and techniques to gain more profit. In situations with high-level customer information on stockpiling reasons and moderate panic intensity, employing social learning enhancement tools and techniques may not benefit the retailer. Finally, the conclusion and directions for future research are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]