The three of us worked very hard on this paper, "Fresh Produce Spatial Price Equilibrium on General Networks: Capturing Commodity Quality Deterioration Through Endogenous Transportation Time Delay Functions with Capacities," and it took three revisions (a record for me, I must say) before acceptance. My co-authors on this paper are Samirasadat "Samira" Samadi, who is one of my PhD students, and Professor Deniz Besik of the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond.
The paper was published in a volume of the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR) this past week, which was extra exciting since it also was the last week of classes of the academic year at UMass Amherst!
The link to the journal publication of the article is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0377221726003759.
The work was inspired by many challenges associated with fresh produce transportation and quality of the commodities because of issues such as drought as in the Panama Canal and now the essential shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz because of the war on Iran. We capture endogeneous transportation delays due to capacity reduction on links and the impact on quality of fresh produce as it travels from supply markets to demand markets. The case study in the paper is on the global trade of bananas, a nutritious and very popular fruit, which is also important for food security. We also propose commodity quality trade network performance measures, supply-based, demand-based, and network-based, that can be applied for an individual commodity or across all commodities.
We are grateful to the EJOR Editor, Professor Mike Yearworth, who handled out paper, and to the reviewers for their comments and suggestions. My co-authors and I very much believe in the relevance and importance of the research that resulted in this paper.
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