It was thrilling to see our paper, "A Spatial Price Network Equilibrium Paradox," published this past week in the Springer journal Optimization Letters!
The paper I co-authored with Ladimer S. Nagurney and Ismael Pour, who is one of my PhD students at the Isenberg School of Management. The work builds on the famous Braess Paradox and reveals through numerous examples that: the addition of a new route from a supply market to a demand market may result in the supply price being lowered; the route costs being increased, and the demand price (the price that the consumers pay) also being increased relative to their values prior to the route addition. This result shows that there could be negative effects for both producers and for consumers and is especially relevant to the case of agricultural commodities. Hence, farmers may suffer in terms of lower prices for their products, and consumers in terms of higher prices that they pay! It is, hence, critical to investigate the impacts of the supply chain network topology, from a network design perspective, that includes the route topology.
This paper was first presented at the conference in Halkidiki in honor of Professor Panos M. Pardalos:
https://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-outstanding-pardalos-70-conference.html
Ismael also presented the paper at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle last Fall and the slide deck can be downloaded here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/INFORMS2024-Presentation-NPS.pdf
The paper went through two revisions and can be accessed through the Springer journal website:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11590-025-02244-y
We have done a lot of research on the Braess Paradox and even hosted the visit of Professor Dietrich Braess when I was a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. More info on the paradox on the Supernetwork Center website: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/braess/braess-new.html
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