Daily Price Cycles and Constant Margins: Recent Events in Canadian Gasoline Retailing
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Retail gasoline pricing in Canada has typically followed certain distinct patterns, ranging from long durations of price rigidity relative to wholesale prices to daily price cycles. This paper examines recent changes to pricing patterns in Canadian cities resulting in new equilibrium behavior, and discusses possible reasons for these changes. Using high frequency retail price data obtained from GasBuddy.com, it is demonstrated that volatility changes exhibited in Toronto appear to correspond to an increased frequency of the price cycle, and replacement of the cycle with fixed retail margins. While multiple factors may have contributed to the first pricing change, the second change corresponds closely to a refinery fire in southern Ontario; this temporary event (in conjunction with a rail strike and refinery maintenance) could have triggered a permanent change in equilibrium behavior. This paper also illustrates problems for academic researchers and policymakers when using low frequency price data to analyze pricing in a market characterized by a price cycle.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it