This is a book about the simultaneous location, production and distri-
bution decisions of a firm entering a competitive market whose spatial
nature is describable by a network in which the market either achieves
an equilibrium or is equilibrium tending. As such, the problem is of
clear theoretical and practical importance, for it is a rather general
version of the problem faced by real firms every day in deciding where
to locate. Further, the timeliness of this subject manifests itself in
the growing excitement and interest found both in the research/academic
communities and in the practitioner/private industry communities for
more comprehensive approaches to competitive facility location analy-
sis and equilibrium modeling of networks. The desire both for new
conceptual approaches yielding enhanced insights and for practical
methodologies to capture these insights drives this interest. While nor-
mative, deterministic facility location modeling techniques currently
provide valuable input into the location decision-making process, re-
searchers and practitioners alike have realized the vast and relatively
untapped potential of more advanced location decision making tech-
niques. In this book, we develop what we believe represents a major new
line of research in the field of competitive facility location analysis;
namely, equilibrium facility location modeling. In particular, this book
offers a number of innovations in the mathe- matical analysis and
computation of solutions to location models which we have pioneered and
which are collected under a single cover for the first time.
