Tacit collusion reduces welfare comparably to explicit collusion but remains mostly unaddressed by antitrust enforcement which greatly depends on evidence of explicit communication. We propose to target specific elements of firms' behavior that facilitate tacit collusion by providing...

We propose a new instrument for estimating the price elasticity of gasoline demand that exploits systematic differences across U.S. states in the pass-through of oil price shocks to retail gasoline prices. These differences, which are primarily driven by variation in the cost of producing and...

Petrol prices tend to be subject to regular changes, often changing more than once a day in many countries, and the number of changes appears to increase. For example, a recent sector inquiry by Germany's competition authority has found that the number of price changes has almost tripled between...

Using a novel dataset, we develop a structural model of the Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) market between the Arabian Gulf and the Far East. We study how fluctuations in oil tanker rates, oil exports, shipowner profits, and bunker fuel prices are determined by shocks to the supply and demand...

Do we have effective competition between the gasoline's big five oligopolists (Aral, Shell, Esso, Total and Jet) and fringe gasoline stations? Using 2014 Market Transparency price data from 66 cities with populations between 60,000 and 100,000, we analyze which brands lead price increases, the...

The theory of geographical markets is based on the notion that economic activity is not evenly spread and regional inequalities have an impact on the decisions of economic agents. Retail gasoline markets are almost perfect examples of geographical markets. The gasoline sold by the stations is a...

We study a novel trade-off in market transparency regulation by estimating a structural model of the German retail gasoline market. Transparent environments enable easy price comparisons and match findings. Restricting transparency such that only the cheapest offers are shown induces firms to...

This paper presents new evidence of asymmetric pass-through, the notion that upward cost shocks are passed through faster than downward cost shocks, in U.S. gasoline prices. Much of the extant literature comes to seemingly contradictory conclusions about the existence of an asymmetry, though the...

Increasing price levels, high price volatility and the suspicion of collusive behavior are important topics of public debates on competition in retail gasoline markets in many countries. Several governments and competition authorities introduced fuel price regulations in form of restrictions on...

This paper investigates the impact of ethanol blending mandates on retail fuel prices in the United States. It uses the modifications of three microeconomics models - partial equilibrium theoretical model by de Gorter and Just, partial equilibrium simulation model of Drabik et al. and Wu and...