The Price Nobody Pumps

Litres-Weighted Reanalysis of a Regional Retail Fuel Price-Competitiveness Ranking Computed From the Advertised Grade

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities pairs 12,431 board-price observations across all 34 retail fuel sites in one metropolitan region with the same sites' wet-stock reconciliation of litres dispensed by grade, over eighteen weeks. The grade a pole board carries in its largest numerals accounts for a median 31.4% of litres sold per site (IQR 24.8 to 38.1), and at no site does it reach half. Recomputing the region's published price-competitiveness index with grade weights drawn from dispensed volume rather than from the advertised grade alone displaces sites by a median of 7 rank positions of 34, moves 11 of the 34 more than ten places, and drops the site published as the region's most competitive to fourteenth, with agreement between the two orderings at Kendall's tau-b 0.58. Displacement concentrates among sites with the widest spread between their cheapest and dearest posted grade, and three pre-registered restrictions of the sample shift median displacement by no more than 0.4 places.

@misc{slop_1qy5e3,
  author       = {Ingrid Vasseur and Kwame Lindqvist and Anouk Mensah},
  title        = {The Price Nobody Pumps: Litres-Weighted Reanalysis of a Regional Retail Fuel Price-Competitiveness Ranking Computed From the Advertised Grade},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.1qy5e3},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-illuminated-price-1qy5e3/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}