monopsony
Sign in to saveIn economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. The microeconomic theory of monopsony assumes a single entity to have market power over all sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service. This is a similar power to that of a monopolist, which can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, where multiple buyers have only one seller of a good or service available to purchase from.
Article
13 sectionsContents
- Etymology
- History
- Static monopsony in a labour market
- Welfare implications
- Minimum wage
- Wage discrimination
- Dynamic models of monopsony
- Empirical problems
- See also
- Notes
- References
- Further reading
- External links
In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. The microeconomic theory of monopsony assumes a single entity to have market power over all sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service. This is a similar power to that of a monopolist, which can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, where multiple buyers have only one seller of a good or service available to purchase from.
==Etymology== The term "monopsony" (from Greek μόνος (mónos) "single" and ὀψωνεῖν (opsōneîn) "to purchase fish") was first introduced by the British economist Joan Robinson in her influential book, The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933). Robinson credited classics scholar Bertrand Hallward of the University of Cambridge with coining the term.