This paper examines a manufacturer's supply management strategies for mitigating yield risk in a complex dynamic supply chain. Two strategies can be adopted for the manufacturer: backup and reliability improvement. Consumers may select to leave (instant consumers) or wait (delaying consumers) when they confront the manufacturer's insufficient inventory. Utilizing the method of multi-agent modeling, a manufacturer and a supplier are modeled as the intelligent agents with the reinforcement learning behavior. The study shows that: 1) when the number of instant consumers is small, reliability improvement strategy should be selected; otherwise, the manufacturer should adopt a backup strategy; 2) only when mean yield is large enough, reliability improvement strategy is the optimal choice; and 3) if yield uncertainty is small, the manufacturer should choose reliability improvement strategy; otherwise, it is suitable to use a backup strategy. In addition, when the main supplier can determine its own wholesale price, it is found that: 1) when the mean yield is small, a lower wholesale price should be designed for the main supplier, to induce higher order quantity under backup strategy; and 2) the impact of yield uncertainty on the manufacturer's supply management strategy can be changed by the main supplier's adaptive pricing behavior. INDEX TERMS Consumer behavior, multi-agent modeling, supply chain management, yield risk.

Whether to use an information sharing mechanism is investigated in a dynamic supply chain, where one manufacturer, one carrier, and one retailer are faced with uncertain yield, demand, and lead time during multiple periods. Each member is modeled as an adaptive agent based on multiagent technique, and their decisions can be adjusted timely to adapt to external environment. There are two choices for the whole supply chain to deal with uncertain risks: information sharing (IS) or no information sharing (NS). Under strategy IS, the information about market demand and the retailer’s inventory can be shared within the supply chain. For each strategy, the effects of yield, demand, and lead time uncertainties on costs of the supply chain and channel members are studied. It is found that (i) it is rewarding for the upstream manufacturer to use a retailer’s shared information under uncertain yield or demand; (ii) however, information sharing (IS) strategy sometimes should be abandoned for other members and the whole supply chain; (iii) counterintuitively, the increase of transportation time uncertainty benefits the retailer.