Market power in the liquid fuels wholesale chain in Argentina: an empirical analysis

Florencia Gabrielli, María Culós, Marcos Herrera Gómez and Manuel Willington

No 4732, Asociación Argentina de Economía Política: Working Papers from Asociación Argentina de Economía Política

Abstract: This paper studies the demand for liquid fuels at the wholesale level, using the discrete choice approach. Demand is conditioned by the presence of wholesale competitors, the existence of a reward card, and the percentage of flagged outlets kept by each firm. Using a novel dataset from Argentina, we provide new empirical evidence that quantifies market power across firms and regions. We find differences among markups estimated at regional levels, based both on different presence of the firms within each region and on price elasticity of demand of each region itself. Even though leading firms tend to have higher markups on the whole, there are specific niche markets where small firms reach higher markups than those they could have obtained in more crowded markets, exceeding markups obtained by larger competitors. Price elasticity of demand is different among regions, partly because it reflects the variability that coexists in the productive structure of each economy and because of different income levels and consumption patterns in these geographic areas.

JEL-codes: C52 L13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2024-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ind and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://aaep.org.ar/works/works2024/4732.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aep:anales:4732

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Asociación Argentina de Economía Política: Working Papers from Asociación Argentina de Economía Política Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Juan Manuel Quintero ().