In 1973 , the member countries of OPEC ( Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries ) decided to boycott the nations that supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War by ceasing the export of oil. The situation led to a very serious crisis that caused enormous inflation in the price of crude oil and paralyzed industry and economic activity in the affected countries, including the United States and its European allies. This embargo demonstrated to the world the importance of oil and gasoline in society and, today, it remains a key resource and changes in its price are a matter of interest every day. Now, a study reveals that the price drop that usually occurs on Mondays follows a specific intention .
A team from the Bioengineering Laboratory of the CEU San Pablo University , in the Community of Madrid, has developed a novel data analysis technique designed to separate the random components from the deterministic ones in a series of data . When this technique was applied to the time series of the price of gasoline in Spain in the last five years and was related to the results of applying it to cardiac information of patients with obstructive sleep apnea, the existence of an intentionality in the drop in the price of gasoline on the first day of the week. According to the researchers, the only rational explanation for this systematic decline is intentional price manipulation .
The data analysis technique developed by members of the CEU Bioengineering Laboratory sought to determine which components are random in the measurements and which are deterministic, mainly with data of biological origin. For example, a person’s heart rate depends on a large number of unpredictable factors, such as whether they are sitting, climbing stairs, or playing sports at the moment; and other factors that can be considered deterministic and predictable, such as the health status of the patient’s cardiovascular system.
The Monday effect on gasoline is intentional
The publication, which was made in the journal Physica D. , applied this new analysis technique to the evolution of the price of gasoline . Monday is the day that oil companies must notify the European Commission of fuel prices and it is from these data that official statistics on fuel prices are obtained. If you were intentionally manipulating the price in a systematic way, you would be introducing a deterministic and predictable component . This hypothesis is the one that the CEU team started from when they analyzed the price of gasoline on a daily basis over a period of five years. His analysis technique indicated the presence of the deterministic component, which was practically null from Tuesday to Friday and slightly positive at the weekend. This would explain the price increase during these days because more trips are usually made on the weekend and gasoline is refueled for the week , increasing demand and therefore the price.
The cost of fuel on a given day is strongly influenced by events that are neither predictable nor controlled: a geopolitical conflict in the exporting countries, a wave of heat or cold that increases the cost of air conditioning, a failure in the refineries … This means that It is very difficult, almost impossible , to predict the price of gasoline in, for example, Spain on March 11, 2019. However, the fact that there is a deterministic component that causes a price drop on Mondays would allow us to predict that the The price of gasoline in Spain on March 11, 2019 (Monday) will in all probability be lower than that of the 10th (Sunday) . If the trend observed in the analysis is followed, the price will be about 3 cents cheaper .
