The Supply Network and Price Dispersion in the Canadian Gasoline Market
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
Abstract This paper examines the impact of variation in transportation options – what I denote the “supply network” – on observed price differences between locations for a specific good, retail gasoline. I use a unique data set of weekly gasoline prices across 44 Canadian cities to analyze how the existence of variation in the available modes of transportation for gasoline between cities (via pipeline, marine tanker, rail or truck) accounts for observed price differences across locations. I find that the supply network is significant – cities connected by lower cost-per-unit methods like pipelines or seaports exhibit smaller mean- and weekly-price differences than those connected only by road or rail, after controlling for distance, regional effects and market size. A pipeline connection results in a reduction in weekly price dispersion equivalent to a 53% reduction in distance between cities, while a maritime connection has the equivalent effect of a 38% reduction in distance between cities.
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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 | 0.003 | 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) | 0.000 | 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