Competition in Oil

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The largest and historically the most influential refinery market for petroleum products in the world has been the Gulf Coast refinery market. Geographically, this market embraces not only the world’s largest concentration of refining capacity along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coasts, but also the great refining and consuming centers of the Atlantic seaboard. The character and extent of competition in this market is therefore a matter of special interest to economists, to the oil industry, and to the legal profession.

Daniel Hamilton offers the first published exploration of the market structure and behavior in this all-important area, as well as a thorough examination of the representativeness of Gulf prices and an analysis of the barriers to entry into this key market area. He provides the only published analysis of the relation of product prices to crude costs, of the time pattern of price and output behavior, of the relation of cost behavior to price-output behavior, and of the other dimensions of Gulf market performance.