Monopsony
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A market situation in which there is only one buyer for a product.
"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."
- 2 (economics) a market in which goods or services are offered by several sellers but there is only one buyer wordnet
- 3 A buyer with disproportionate power.
"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."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"Big business or big government often leads to monopoly and monopsony."
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.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.