We have seen that market power in product markets exists when firms have the ability to set the prices they charge, within the limits of the demand curve for their products. Depending on the factor supply curve, firms may also have some power to set prices they pay in factor markets. Further, under this model of perfect competition, employers are “price-takers,” meaning that they must accept the market wage and have no way of influencing it. In other words, an employer only needs to pay one cent more than its competitors to have an unlimited supply of workers. But monopsony power, Bahn noted, is present not just when there are only a few employers in a particular labor market. Similarly, monopsonist firms would be expected to use the power of setting wages in the intersection of employment policy with social identities, such as caste, ethnicity and race.

In 1993, when 484 players were released to the market as free agents, those players received pay increases averaging more than 100%. Under the NFL collective bargaining agreement in effect in 1998, players could become unrestricted free agents if they had been playing for four years. There were 305 unrestricted free agents (out of a total player pool of approximately 1,700) that year.

Freeman estimated that since these new entrants brought little capital with them, the global capital/labour ratio was cut by 55 to 60% from what it would otherwise have been. This shifted the balance between capital and labour in favour of labour. Andrew Glyn correctly predicted that it would reverse the post-Second World War shift in the distribution of income in favour of labour (Glyn 2002, 2006). This would be due to the increase in, “Marx’s reserve army of labour going global”, as a result of which, “The bargaining chips would be in the hands of capital to a degree not seen since the industrial revolution” (Glyn 2006). Monopsony’s can create negative effects such as forcing workers and suppliers to accept a lower wage.

1. Moreover, the sellers have to agree with the terms and conditions of the buyer.
2. Many studies have shown that the salaries of professional athletes in various team sports fell far short of their MRPs while monopsony prevailed.
3. In the crowdsourcing system, workers from high-income countries compete with those with similar capabilities from low–middle-income countries.
4. However, it is necessary to make a distinction between sites of value extraction and of value capture, with monopsony introduced into the scenario.
5. The first-order condition for maximum profit is then satisfied at point A of the diagram, where the MC and MRP  curves intersect.

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. Monopsonist gets their power from being the only consumer of the product or service.

Economists and policymakers have increasingly become concerned with the domination of just a handful of highly successful companies controlling an outsized market share in a given industry. High barriers to entry, such as regulations or high monopsony examples in india capital requirements, can make it difficult for new buyers to enter the market and compete with the existing buyer. This may be true in situations where a buyer must be credentialed, hold certain permits, or meet exclusive criteria.

Marx’s prices of production are the sum of the various inputs that go into making a product, plus a normal profit. With regard to labour, the cost of production and reproduction of labour power can be taken to be the living wage. With the continental economies of China and India undergoing the Lewisian transition of workers from agriculture to industry and modern services, the result was hyper-competition among the supplier economies of the Global South.

Impact of a Monopsony

Also, price differentiation could be disadvantageous for the consumers. A business is said to have a monopoly position in the industry if it has captured the majority of the market share and can influence the business decisions of other players in that industry. The “monopolist” also becomes the trendsetter and price leader, which are followed by the other players. Whatever the source of monopsony power, the expected result is the same. Buyers with monopsony power are likely to pay a lower price and to buy a smaller quantity of a particular factor than buyers who operate in a more competitive environment. Free agency has increased player share of total revenues in each of the major men’s team sports.

Monopoly vs. Monopsony Example

In the latter, a taxi ride in New York would still cost more than a taxi ride in Delhi. However, in online web-based work there may be no difference in payment based on location, while skill and reputation are what would matter. The identification of monopsony capitalism or global monopsony capitalism as the form of present-day capitalism was earlier made by Ashok Kumar (2020), Dev Nathan (2020) and in Nathan et al. (2022a).

The inelasticity of supply, however, has to be related to both suppliers and their workers. This leads to the analysis of labour conditions in varying degrees of monopsony. IT service providers have the greatest ability to switch from one buyer to another, and even from one sector to another. IT is a general-purpose technology, which can be applied in literally every domain or sector of economic, social and political activity. An IT service firm can switch from supplying to the financial sector to the engineering one or even the chemicals sector.

However, it would be a mistake to see this as merely a new incarnation of an old phenomenon, as old wine in a new bottle. The analogy of smallholder production in agriculture holds to an extent. However, a deeper look is needed to understand the features of the evolving gig monopsony economy as a new form of capitalism. Of course, it will have resemblances with both smallholder production and wages as a labour-power transaction, but it is necessary to go beyond both of those analogies.

What are Some Examples of Monopolistic Markets?

In Nathan (2020), the more accurate term oligopsony was used as the situation is that of a few buyers in the market. This is particularly important where there is collusion between oligopsonist firms—for instance, in tacit agreements https://1investing.in/ not to poach workers from each other’s enterprises. At the same time, monopsony should always be understood as involving degrees of monopsony (Manning 2003), just as we accept that monopoly involves degrees of monopoly.

The term monopsony, however, has not really caught on in economic analysis and remains a curiosum (Manning 2003). There has been some contemporary analysis of monopsony, particularly in labour markets in current high-income countries (HICs). Thus, while studying the labour market, it is necessary to introduce power relations into the analysis, in addition to the usual demand and supply relations. The paper makes a number of contributions to discussions of global production and labour.

Market Power over Suppliers

A monopsony is an economic condition in the markets in which there is a solitary purchaser. Much like monopoly, monopsonies too indicate flaws in the market conditions. The only difference between a monopsony and monopoly is the entity controlling the situation. A key feature of labour in high-monopsony-power GVC segments, such as in garments, is that workers are at the low-wage end.

As Manning points out (2003), this does not substitute for demand–supply analysis, but adds the element of power into this analysis. When a monopsony has power over labour, it is able to extract lower wages. This is more likely in small towns and labour markets as there are often many other firms that workers could choose from.

Limited Product Demand

When the then-CEO of Uber was asked why commissions were being increased from 25 to 30 per cent, his reply was, “Because we can,” (quoted in Woodcock and Graham, 2020). This simple statement is indicative of the enormous monopsony market power of platforms vis-à-vis their workers. Since gig workers must invest to purchase the means of production, they are tied-in to the industry, if not to a particular firm. But given the advantages of scale, the number of options in any service is quite limited, such as Uber and Lyft only for taxi services in the USA, or Uber and Ola in India.

However, the people of the town have no other option than to work for the company if they want an income. A monopsony doesn’t just refer to the purchase of goods, but also services such as labour. Quite simply, it is an economic transaction where there is only one buyer, but many sellers. However, monopsony power might also be due to circumstances affecting entry of workers on the supply side (like in the referenced case above), directly reducing the elasticity of labour supply to firms.