Legislators often attach specific names to individual taxes to promote their purpose, increase transparency, and ease public backlash over tax increases. While having political benefits, does the simple act of naming and promoting a tax for a specific purpose have a more meaningful effect in the...

Collecting information on prices is a costly endeavor. The cost depends on the relative ease with which those prices can be collected, and in many retail gasoline markets, there is a substantial divide in the ease of collecting information with regular grade gasoline on one side of the divide...

This paper examines dynamic pricing behavior in retail gasoline markets for 19 Canadian cities over 574 weeks. I find three distinct retail pricing patterns: 1. standard cost-based pricing, 2. sticky pricing, and 3. steep, asymmetric retail price cycles that, while seldom documented empirically,...

Motivated by the discovery of apparent Edgeworth Cycles in many retail gasoline markets, this paper extends the Maskin & Tirole [1988] theory of Edgeworth Cycles to a wide range of more complicated and realistic settings. Taking a computational approach to search for Markov Perfect Equilibria, I...

In this article, I exploit a new station-level, twelve-hourly price dataset to examine the strong retail price cycles in the Toronto gasoline market. The cycles are visually similar to the theoretical Edgeworth Cycles of Maskin & Tirole [1988]: strongly asymmetric, tall, rapid, and highly...