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Monopoly or Competition? Unraveling the Amazon Paradox

Stephen Maher & Scott M. Aquanno

Review of Radical Political Economics2026https://doi.org/10.1177/04866134261415639article
AJG 1ABDC B
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

This article draws on the case of Amazon to highlight the inadequacy of theories of imperfect competition and monopoly capital to explain corporate capitalism. As it demonstrates, recent revisions to these frameworks to account for the apparently competitive behavior of Amazon and other large tech firms perpetuate a longer-term trend of compensating for theoretical shortcomings by introducing additional complexity without addressing core problems. We argue that the classical Marxian theory of real competition offers a more coherent and parsimonious explanation for Amazon’s behavior: simply, Amazon does not exhibit the conventional signs of monopoly because it is not a monopoly . JEL Classification : B510, L110

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/04866134261415639

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@article{stephen2026,
  title        = {{Monopoly or Competition? Unraveling the Amazon Paradox}},
  author       = {Stephen Maher & Scott M. Aquanno},
  journal      = {Review of Radical Political Economics},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/04866134261415639},
}

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Monopoly or Competition? Unraveling the Amazon Paradox

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.