Product Differentiation, Competition and Prices in the Retail Gasoline Industry

Download or read book Product Differentiation, Competition and Prices in the Retail Gasoline Industry written by Mark David Manuszak and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis presents a series of studies of the retail gasoline industry using data from Hawaii. This first chapter examines a number of pricing patterns in the data and finds evidence that gasoline stations set prices which are consistent with a number of forms of price discrimination. The second chapter analyzes various patterns of cross-sectional, cross-market and intertemporal variation in the data to investigate their suitability for use in structural econometric estimation. The remainder of the dissertation consists of specification and estimation of a structural model of supply and demand for retail gasoline products sold at individual gasoline stations. This detailed micro-level analysis permits examination of a number of important issues in the industry, most notably the importance of spatial differentiation in the industry. The third chapter estimates the model and computes new equilibria under a number of asymmetric taxation regimes in order to examine the impact of such tax policies on producer and consumer welfare as well as tax revenue. The fourth chapter examines whether there is any evidence of tacitly collusive behavior in the Hawaiian retail gasoline industry and concludes that, in fact, conduct is fairly competitive in this industry and market.