| >> it's a market-maker that provides a venue for other vendors to sell stuff >That's not what a market maker is. A market maker is a market participant that guarantees to buy or sell something if no other buyer or seller can be found. Right, but the similarity between a market maker in finance, and a marketplace maker in ecommerce, is that both of them have a lot more information than an ordinary buyer or seller. It doesn't matter if Amazon doesn't really act as a counterparty: the point is about how much knowledge it has, compared to the average participant. >Running a marketplace, if it does not mean being a monopolist (which you are insisting it does not), is being a vendor, a vendor of particular services. I was pointing out that there are two levels we're looking at: 1. Amazon as a provider of a marketplace 2. Amazon as that marketplace and what it entails about how much knowledge it possesses. Recall that this is in the context of Hayek's arguments in The Use of Knowledge in Society, because the article's author referenced that explicitly. Now, when I said Amazon isn't a monopolist, this is in terms of 1. Amazon is definitely not the only provider of an ecommerce marketplace with a global reach. In that sense, it's not a monopoly. But Amazon is a "monopoly" in the sense that Hayek alluded to in his essay, i.e. in terms of 2. Hayek wrote in that essay: The halfway house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly. Technically, it is still an oligopolist, since it is not the sole provider of ecommerce in America, but "organized industries" sounds like an apt way to describe what Amazon is doing. And it's in this particular sense of Hayek's that I referred to Amazon as a "monopoly". |