Daily Price Cycles and Constant Margins: Recent Events in Canadian Gasoline Retailing

Retail gasoline pricing in Canada has typically followed certain distinct patterns, ranging from long durations of price rigidity relative to wholesale prices to daily price cycles. This paper examines recent changes to pricing patterns in Canadian cities resulting in new equilibrium behavior, and discusses possible reasons for these changes. Using high frequency retail price data obtained from GasBuddy.com, it is demonstrated that volatility...