Queuing to refuel before price rise in China: How do gasoline price changes affect consumer responses and behaviours?

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As the largest automobile market in the world, gasoline price has had a profound impact on consumers in China. However, consumers always queue to refuel when gasoline prices rise. To examine the consumer responses and behaviors to gasoline price rise, we built a Motivation-Individuality-Reaction (MIR) model with a novel comprehensive analysis approach that employed a social network-based public survey and a questionnaire-based individual survey. We found that the tax-included gasoline prices are opaque partly because of the neutral public attitude, and while Chinese consumers are sensitive to gasoline prices, the sensitivity appears to decrease when there are continuous price rises. Personal perceptions rather than social-demographics were found to have a significant effect on consumer behaviour, which also explained the queuing to refuel actions. The findings also suggested that gasoline price rises should be no more than 20% over the short term to ensure consumer market stability. Consumer vehicle purchasing behaviours were found to be less sensitive to gasoline prices than vehicle using behaviours, which verified the applicability and effectiveness of the MIR model in analyzing consumer daily behaviours. The proposed model and mixed-methods-based approach could be applied to a wider range of social science-based energy research and behavioural economics analysis.