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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
QIAN Yutong
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DOI:10.17265/2328-2185/2026.05.004
Nanjing Foreign Language School, Nanjing, China
Amazon’s prices undercut most surviving competitors and its warehouse wages sit above the statutory floor, yet the fortune capitalised in its founder’s equity is far larger than consumer surplus or wage premia can explain within standard welfare accounting. This paper argues that the missing value lies in the gradual restructuring of the choice environments in which buyers and workers continue to behave rationally. Drawing on the literature on opportunity cost, path dependence, and two-sided platforms, it shows that each locally optimal purchase, repeated across millions of shoppers, erodes the viability of the alternatives that would otherwise constrain the platform, so that consumers gain surplus on today’s menu while forgoing an uncapitalised surplus on tomorrow’s. The same mechanism operates in regional labour markets, where Amazon’s growing share of logistics employment re-anchors workers’ outside options. Because monopoly on the buyer side and monopsony on the labour side are produced by a single physical infrastructure, their value compounds rather than adds. The paper concludes that platform wealth is not exploitative in the conventional sense: it accumulates by being chosen, converting other people’s optionality into a priced claim.
Amazon, monopsony, platform economics, opportunity cost, path dependence, consumer surplus
QIAN Yutong. (2026). When Markets Produce Billionaires: Amazon, Monopsony, and the Limits of Efficiency Arguments. Management Studies, Vol. 14, No. 5, 290-293. doi: 10.17265/2328-2185/2026.05.004.
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