Abstract: Health rumors mediate the purchasing behaviors of patient populations for Over-the-Counter(OTC) drugs, and differential patients have varying receptivity in health rumors, which brings about various drug purchasing strategies. This paper focuses on the dual-channel supply chain network consisting of pharmaceutical manufacturers, drugstores and patient demand market, and develops a non-cooperative game model in which the rumors receptivity, medical reimbursement, online-purchasing risk, patients' utility as well as channel preferences are included in the mathematical framework, so as to describe the decision-makers' optimum behavior and analyze the influence of these factors on supply chain's equilibrium strategies and benefits. The results show that: 1) As patients' receptivity to rumors increases, the trading volume in the corresponding channel increases and the trading price in the patient demand market decreases; 2) Channel preferences positively affect the trading volume in the corresponding channel and demand market size; 3) Higher reimbursement rates will increase traditional channel's trading volume and overall efficiency, and decrease the direct channel's trading volume.

Key words: drugs dual-channel supply chain, health rumors intervention, channel preference, competition games