Gas prices—and therefore oil prices—wield a tight grip on the American consumer psyche. No other commodity’s prices are tracked so closely, advertised so prominently, and hold such significance in the minds of the American people as gas prices. It is also a market few people understand.

When gas prices are low, people are pleased, or at the very least do not complain about gas prices. But when gas prices are high—which everyone immediately knows because they’re posted in giant signs at hundreds of thousands of public locations across the country—people get mad, politicians react to that anger, and lots of hemming and hawing is done.

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At some point in their lives, most people learn some version, no matter how rudimentary, of the supply and demand curve. At some later point in their lives, nearly all of those people conclude none of that applies to oil markets, which are, they claim, manipulated by politicians, or a cartel of Western oil companies, or OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, with 13 members mostly from the Middle East and Africa.

But that is a mistake, Clark Williams-Derry, an energy analyst for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told Motherboard. He said oil markets are much closer to the classic version of Economics 101 with the supply and demand curves than, say, iPhone prices, where Apple decides what an iPhone costs and then sells it for that price.

In contrast, “Oil prices are set, basically, by a bunch of buyers and a bunch of sellers who are engaged in a nonstop auction for oil,” Williams-Derry said. And the market is volatile and fickle. “Small imbalances between supply and demand, even just a percent or two, can push prices all over the place, because nobody wants to be the refiner that doesn’t have enough oil.”

It is true that OPEC, for example, can still manipulate prices in the oil markets by choosing not to release spare production capacity, Medlock said, which is often, but not always, a matter of diplomacy between OPEC members and the U.S. But this type of dynamic—in which a single or small group of companies have some ability to manipulate prices in their market due to their size—is hardly unique to oil markets, as researcher Matt Stoller has extensively documented in his newsletter about monopoly power in global markets. But the oil market is still sufficiently competitive that “padding profits” in the traditional sense, Medlock said, would be difficult to do.