Dynamic price model based on transmission delay — Petroleum price fluctuation in China

Petroleum is a kind of fundamental energy resource. Its price fluctuation transmits from upper-stream industry to the lower-stream industry as the production factors price changes. And this leads to the price changes of final consumption. Meantime, due to the cycle of industrial chain, the price changes of lower-stream industry also affect the upper-stream industry in return. This price transmission path is quite complicated. Firstly, it includes both direct and indirect paths; secondly, the transmission process is accompanied with time delay. The traditional input-output price model based on cost-push theory can efficiently solve the first problem when estimating the impact of price fluctuation on the whole price system. However, it neither reflects the dynamic characteristics of price transmission with time nor solves the second problem. To solve this problem, this paper uses the directed weighted network to describe the price transmission among industrial sectors by taking the time-dimension into account, and dynamic price transmission network model is constructed. This model not only describes transmission time delay more accurately, but also calculates the price fluctuation dynamically. On this basis, by utilizing the 2007 Chinese input-output table, this paper conducts empirical analysis on the impact of petroleum price fluctuation on other sectors. The empirical results indicate that the price fluctuation transmission mainly depends on two factors, the price reaction period Tk and the consumption relationship with petroleum aik. 1) If t < Tk, then the price change of sector k at period t Δpkt = 0, the petroleum price fluctuation has not transmitted to the sector k, so the price of sector k remains unchanged. 2) If t > Tk, then Δpkt > 0, and the greater aik, the higher price change rate. 3) If t → ∞, it is the same with that in traditional input-output price model. So it can be clearly seen that dynamic price transmission network model is more general than the traditional model, and the traditional model is just an asymptotical special case when time approaches to infinity.