Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Monopsony
/məˈnɒpsəni/noun
A market with only one buyer, who can push the price down the way a monopolist pushes it up.
The Greek roots
μόνος
mónos
single, alone
ὀψωνία
opsōnía
buying of provisions
Literally: “single buyer of provisions”
The story of the word
Joan Robinson needed a name in 1933 for the mirror image of monopoly and asked a Cambridge classicist to supply the Greek. The word he built means one shopper doing the household provisioning, which is a very domestic image for a very unbalanced market. A company town, a national health service buying medicines, and a lone employer in a rural county all behave the same way.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1933
Same family
monopolyoligopsonymonologuemonastery
In a sentence
Where one hospital group employs every nurse in the region, wages behave as monopsony theory predicts.
The report argues that monopsony power explains the flat wages better than automation does.