Evolutionary Dynamics of Signaling Traps in Supply Chain Finance: Enhancing Logistics Resilience via a Hybrid Game-Theoretic and Agent-Based Approach

In Supply Chain Finance (), managing information asymmetry and credit risk contagion is a critical challenge for capital-constrained firms. While technological solutions such as blockchain offer enhanced transparency, their high implementation costs often exclude small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in developing economies. This paper investigates the operations-finance interface by examining whether strategic pricing contracts can serve as a cost-effective, intrinsic substitute for technological enforcement to stabilize financial networks and ensure the continuity of physical logistics flows. We propose an integrated economic framework that bridges micro-level contracting with macro-level supply chain resilience. First, using a Signaling Game, we analytically define the conditions for a “Signaling Trap,” where high-quality suppliers utilize wholesale price discounts as credible signals of reliability to financiers, thereby preventing market pooling and collapse. Second, we embed these behavioral rules into an evolutionary Agent-Based Model () to simulate financing adoption across complex network topologies (Scale-Free, Random, and Small-World). Our comparative analysis reveals a critical managerial trade-off: while Buyer Direct Financing () is Pareto-optimal in highly transparent and stable environments, traditional Purchase Order Financing () augmented with strategic signaling provides superior resilience against credit contagion in highly opaque markets, thereby preventing operational disruptions in the broader logistics network. Remarkably, our computational experiments demonstrate that this intrinsic economic mechanism achieves of the systemic efficiency provided by flawless blockchain systems. These findings offer supply chain managers and policymakers a robust, cost-effective pathway for risk mitigation, demonstrating how aligning operational pricing strategies with financial incentives as a substitute for expensive digital infrastructure to safeguard supply chain operations and logistics performance.