For many, the verdict was already clear before the tank discount was even introduced: the oil companies pocket this money.

A few days before the introduction, the price of petrol rose, and there was great suspicion: they're only doing that in preparation for the tank discount.

Ralph Bollman

Correspondent for economic policy and deputy head of business and “Money & More” for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

Marcus Theurer

Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

  • Follow I follow

The general consensus was that the tank discount was not working.

But now the situation is different.

Two independent scientific quick estimates came to the conclusion that the tank discount probably reached customers almost in full.

One was delivered by the Ifo Institute in Munich at the beginning of the week, the other by economics Monika Schnitzer on Thursday, who has not yet been accused of being too close to the FDP, which pushed through the discount in the coalition.

Schnitzer came to the conclusion that 90 percent of the petrol discount had reached the customer, around four cents per liter had remained with the oil companies.

Perhaps even 102 percent of the diesel discount reached customers.

The scientists determined this by comparing it with petrol prices in France.

The FAS

reported last Sunday: The international stock exchange price for petrol also developed in a similar way to that in Germany or France.

That's often the case with the petrol market: it invites misunderstandings if you don't know the exact mechanisms of the market.

And that has consequences for the assessment of what happened.

Why gas stations can have competition

The first misunderstanding: If the prices of different gas stations move in step with each other, this does not necessarily mean that the prices have been agreed.

Fierce competition can also cause prices to converge.

The second misunderstanding: Markets with a few large companies, so-called oligopolies, are not always poor in competition.

The supermarkets are also oligopolies, and nobody has complained about a lack of competition.

As early as 1883, the French mathematician Joseph Bertrand described how gas stations behave today.

At that time he developed a model of economic oligopolies in which prices move in circles: they always fall a little until they suddenly rise again.

This is what happens today with petrol and diesel several times a day.

Bertrand knew several prerequisites for this: suppliers may compete on price, but even the cheapest supplier cannot take over the entire market.

And: The providers don't want to make life easy for themselves, they want to compete with each other.

There is one exception: when several gas stations in a region have their pricing committed to their computer, their profit margins grow in the first year.

An international team of researchers has studied this and believes that computers learn over time not to make life difficult for one another.

Nevertheless, the competition between petrol stations is greater than one might think: of the approximately 14,000 petrol stations in Germany, around 45 percent are owned by the four largest companies, Aral, Shell, Total and Esso.

But there are also about 2,800 free gas stations that are not tied to large oil companies.

"If the oil multinationals would now agree to keep the prices at the gas stations high together, then they would have to fear that the many free gas stations would undercut them and poach customers away,"

the Düsseldorf economist Justus Haucap points out.

“There is relatively intense competition there.”