Oligopoly
/ˌɒlɪˈɡɒpəli/noun
A market in which a small number of sellers supply most of the output and each one's decisions move the others.
The Greek roots
Literally: “selling by a few”
The story of the word
Thomas More put oligopolium into Utopia in 1516, observing that a handful of sellers can squeeze a market as thoroughly as a single one. Economists then left the word alone for four centuries and reached for it only in the 1930s, when Chamberlin and Robinson broke the crude split between monopoly and competition into finer grades. πωλεῖν also hides inside bibliopole, the seller of books.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1930s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Four supermarket chains take most of the grocery spend, which is an oligopoly by any test.
Airlines on that route behave like an oligopoly whenever fuel prices rise.