SPATIAL PRICE OLIGOPOLY EQUILIBRIUM MODELS TO THE BRAZILIAN PETROLEUM REFINED PRODUCTS MARKET / MODELOS DE EQUILÍBRIO ESPACIAL DE PREÇOS PARA O MERCADO OLIGOPOLIZADO DE DERIVADOS DE PETRÓLEO BRASILEIRO

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2002

RESUMO

The Brazilian petroleum refined products market is being opened to competition this year, leaving an environment of regulated prices to another one where the prices are defined by the supply demand interactions. Considering this new scenario, there is a concern about how high the prices will be, and about their impact on the consumers and on the local producers. This thesis proposes some mathematical models to predict prices, production, consumption, and import and export levels of petroleum-refined products in all the sub-regions of the Brazilian market. Instead of a competitive market, the supply of refined products is considered an oligopoly market, especially in the short term, given the already installed refining capacity and the high costs involved in building new refineries. These models are multi-products, and they consider an important characteristic of the production of refined products, the impossibility of producing only one refined product. Hence, constraints where the production of one refined product is related to the production of the others are considered. The first model considers a closed oligopoly market, with a fixed number of firms. This problem is formulated as a Nash equilibrium problem. A second model is presented generalizing the first one to consider the possibility of ceiling demand prices politically defined. The third model relaxes the assumption of a fixed number of firms in the first model, and considers the possibility of competition by new entrants. A fourth model is discussed, where it is assumed that there is a leader firm in the market, which can define its strategy before the other firms, similar to the economic problem of Stackelberg. All the models are formulated as variational inequalities problems, and the last model is also a bi-level programming problem. Solution algorithms for the three first models are proposed. Some analyses of the Brazilian petroleum refined- products market are presented.

ASSUNTO(S)

inequacoes variacionais oligopolio variational inequalities petroleum refining oligopoly price equilibrium equilibrio de precos refino de petroleo

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