The stoichiometry of supply chains

We propose a plausible conjecture about what goes on inside the black box of the Leontief-Liebig production function. The approach is based on an idea that the conversion of resources into a final product in an industrial supply chain occurs in much the same manner as does the conversion of substrates into different molecules in an enzyme-catalyzed biochemical reaction. A bottleneck principle is derived according to which at any moment the steady-state output of a supply chain is completely controlled by a single factor of production. The reduction of complexity is made possible owing to the sigmoid inputresponse of an individual node in the chain.