Submatrix monotonicity of the Perron root (Q1758447)

It is well-known that increasing an entry of a positive matrix increases its Perron root. The authors consider a block-matrix extension of this property. They introduce the following partial order on \(k\times k\) nonnegative matrices: \(A\precsim B\) iff \(A\) and \(B\) occur as submatrices in the same position in otherwise equal nonnegative matrices \(F\) and \(G\) for which \(\varrho(F)\leq\varrho(G)\). Here, \(\varrho\) denotes the spectral radius of a matrix (or, equivalently in the case of nonnegative matrices, its Perron root). The surprising main result in this article is that this partial order is equivalent to the entrywise partial order.