The Inner Workings of a Hub-and-Spoke Cartel in the Automotive Fuel Industry
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study the inner workings of a hub-and-spoke cartel in the Brazilian automotive fuel industry. Based on court documents and detailed price and sales data, we discuss how gas station owners (spokes) operating inside the federal capital received help from fuel distributors (hub) to reduce dispersion of and increase gasoline’s retail price. We provide evidence that distributor cartel members benefited by raising wholesale prices while keeping competitors from supplying retail cartel members. We also provide theoretical foundations and empirical evidence for a new mechanism through which hubs help spokes: smoothing cost fluctuations. (JEL K21, L12, L22, L32, L71, L81, O14)
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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