The Effects of Gasoline Price Regulations: Experimental Evidence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Economic theory suggests that gasoline retail markets are prone to collusive behavior. Oligopoly market structures prevail, market interactions occur frequently, prices are highly transparent, and demand is rather inelastic. A recent sector inquiry in Germany backed suspicions of tacit collusion and suggested to adopt regulatory pricing rules for gas stations similar to those implemented in Austria, parts of Australia, Luxembourg or parts of Canada. In order to increase consumer welfare these rules either restrict the number of price changes per day or they limit the mark‐up for gasoline retail prices. As theoretical predictions about the impact of these measures are mixed and empirical studies rare, we analyze the effects, using an experimental gasoline market in the lab. Our results reveal that two of the suggested rules rather decrease consumer welfare: The Austrian rule which only allows one price increase per day (while price cuts are always possible) and the Luxembourg rule which introduces a maximum markup for retailers. While no rule tends to induce lower retail prices, the Western Australian rule which allows at most one daily price change (no matter whether up or down) does at least not harm consumers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".