The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) exposed individuals to a great uncertainty about its health and economic ramifications, especially in the early days and weeks of the outbreak. This study documents oil and gasoline market implications of individuals’ behavior upon such uncertainty by analyzing the relationship between Google search queries related to COVID-19—information search that reflects one's level of concern about the subject (risk perception)—and the performance of oil and gasoline markets during the pandemic. The empirical analysis based on daily data and a structural vector autoregressive model reveals that a unit increase in the popularity of COVID-19 related global search queries, after controlling for COVID-19 cases, results in 0.083% and 0.104% of a cumulative decline in Dow Jones US Oil & Gas Total index and New York Harbor Conventional Gasoline Regular spot price, respectively, after one day, 0.189% and 0.234% of a cumulative decline after one week, and 0.191% and 0.237% of a cumulative decline after two weeks. The reaction of Brent and West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices to the spike in COVID-19 related online searches is found to be statistically insignificant, which can be explained by oil price pass-through into gasoline spot price.

新型冠状病毒 (COVID-19) 使个人面临其健康和经济后果的巨大不确定性，尤其是在爆发的最初几天和几周内。这项研究通过分析与 COVID-19 相关的谷歌搜索查询（反映一个人对该主题的关注程度（风险感知）的信息搜索）与石油性能之间的关系，记录了个人行为对这种不确定性的石油和汽油市场影响和大流行期间的汽油市场。基于日常数据和结构向量自回归模型的实证分析表明，在控制 COVID-19 案例后，与 COVID-19 相关的全球搜索查询的流行度增加一个单位，导致累计下降 0.083% 和 0.104%道琼斯美国石油和 Gas Total指数和New York Harbour Conventional Gasoline Regular现货价格分别在一天后、一周后累计下跌0.189%和0.234%，两周后累计下跌0.191%和0.237%。发现布伦特和西德克萨斯中质原油价格对 COVID-19 相关在线搜索飙升的反应在统计上并不显着，这可以用油价传递到汽油现货价格来解释。