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<p><strong>Purpose:</strong> Preventivelateral transshipment can respond to customers who will choose a substitute or to give up when the product is out of stock. Motivatedby the common practice, adecision-making model of preventive lateral transshipment with multi sellingperiods is developed. The purpose of the paper is to explore the optimal preventive lateral transshipment policy with multi selling periods.</p><p><strong>Design/methodology/approach:</strong> With adiscrete-time dynamic programming model, we take a dynamic programming approach and adopt backward induction to analyze two retailers’ preventive lateral transshipment policy.</p><p><strong>Findings: </strong>The optimal preventivelateral transshipment policy is a threshold policy which depends on both theremaining selling periods and inventory level. The above properties ensure thattwo retailers can control inventory with preventive lateral transshipment.</p><p><strong>Practical implications: </strong>The retailer can adjust inventory via the thresholdtype policy. The simple decisionrule which compares on-hand inventory level with the critical inventory level can be used to control inventory by preventive lateral transshipment.</p><p><strong>Originality/value: </strong>A discrete-timedecision-making model of preventive lateral transshipment policy isformulated. This model takes consideration of multi selling periods, whichis different from most existing researches on preventive lateraltransshipment.</p>