monopsony
/məˈnɑpsəni/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.75 in modern English
16
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
4
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A buyer with disproportionate power.
Example Sentences
- "Our next task is to consider the change in the amount of a commodity purchased when the market changes from an indefinitely large number of competing buyers to a single buying agency. This may be described as the comparison between competitive and monopsony buying, just as the corresponding comparison for selling was called the comparison between competitive and monopoly output."
- "It appears to follow that employment, far from falling, may be raised by an adroitly contrived legal minimum wage or collective agreement. Indeed, this proposition is an important one in the theory of both wage regulation and trade unionism. Its applicability is sometimes limited, however, even when monopsony is significant, by the danger that the employer may be driven out of business completely, as when, because of his own irremediable inefficiency or other objective disadvantages, monopsony profit achieved at his workers' expense is the differential between hanging on and outright failure."
- "Examples of monopsonies are few. One limited monopsony is the U.S. federal government, which orders certain defense and security systems often with the condition that it be the sole client to be delivered the product, thus a monopsony. […] Indeed, any government is a natural monopsony, at least in some areas. Absolutist, state-run economies, like [Joseph] Stalin's Soviet Union or North Korea, are dominated by monopolies and monopsonies, which often are granted to cronies by those in power. […] In today's commercial markets, there are next to no true large monopsonies."
- "For purposes of evaluating monopsony cases from the standpoint of economic efficiency, it makes sense to adopt a "purpose"-oriented classification system. After all, all monopsony cases can be reduced to either a unilateral or collusive use of buying power in order to promote the interests of the buyer."
- "In a monopsony, the buyer has power over sellers instead of the other way around. Google and Amazon aren't just powerful sellers; they're powerful buyers too. Amazon's reach in the book market gives it enormous power over publishers. Google's monopsonies over search, ads, and video translate into dominance over numerous cultural domains, most directly affecting recording artists, record labels, songwriters, music publishers, journalists, and news publishers."
- "The result is different when the resource buyer is a monopsony. The monopsony firm is a single buyer, and therefore it faces the market supply curve."
Etymology
From Ancient Greek μόνος (mónos, “alone, solitary; singular, unique”) + ὀψωνέω (opsōnéō, “to buy fish or victuals in general”) + -y, modelled after monopoly. ὀψωνέω is from ὄψον (ópson, “delicacies”) + ὠνέομαι (ōnéomai, “to buy, purchase”). The English word was coined by British classics scholar Bertrand Hallward (1901–2003), and popularized by British economist Joan Robinson (1903–1983) in her book The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933): see the quotation.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: μόνος
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /məˈnɑpsəni/
- British English: /məˈnɒpsəni/