How to Use oligopoly in a Sentence

oligopoly

noun
  • Monopoly or oligopoly seems to be the order of the day.
    Steve Lohr, New York Times, 20 May 2021
  • Unlike the evil oligarchy of ancient Athens, the A.I. oligopoly set out to do good.
    Wendell Wallach, Fortune, 16 June 2022
  • Though the draw did him no favors, the lanky Russian is the best bet in this tournament to crack the Big Three oligopoly.
    Jon Wertheim, SI.com, 26 Aug. 2019
  • This is precisely the kind of oligopoly that the antitrust laws were meant to prevent.
    Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, 19 Dec. 2019
  • The disk drive market is an oligopoly with three players.
    John Dorfman, Forbes, 31 Jan. 2022
  • And the unchanging ranks at the top of the industry suggest an oligopoly.
    Rakesh Kumar, Fortune, 13 June 2023
  • Broadcast television had been an oligopoly from the start.
    Louis Menand, The New Yorker, 30 Jan. 2023
  • The prescription hearing-aid industry, led by an oligopoly known as the Big Five that controls more than 90 percent of the market for hearing aids, failed to stop the bill.
    Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 30 June 2022
  • The goal of the decrees was to fight oligopolies by limiting studio control over movie theaters.
    Steven Zeitchik, Washington Post, 22 Nov. 2019
  • Many car dealerships are now very wealthy corporate behemoths and the Big Three are no longer an oligopoly with the market to themselves.
    Peter Weber, The Week, 21 June 2023
  • But against that, consider that Micron is part of an oligopoly in memory chips.
    John Dorfman, Forbes, 16 May 2022
  • The big companies have the clout of oligopolies, a market structure where a few large firms have undue pricing power.
    Edward Lotterman, Twin Cities, 29 Apr. 2017
  • How long can this odd pairing of socialism and oligopoly persist?
    Joel Kotkin, Orange County Register, 4 June 2017
  • And with the tight oligopoly of three bureaus, there isn’t much advantage in getting reports right or protecting the data used to create them.
    David Dayen, New Republic, 12 Sep. 2017
  • Australia is made up of cozy oligopolies or even duopolies, making it a poor training ground for entrepreneurship.
    Michael Heath, Bloomberg.com, 2 Oct. 2017
  • Each warned that the cloud oligopoly carries risks for customers if the sector becomes lethargic, but none called for a government crackdown.
    Jacob Carpenter, Fortune, 8 Mar. 2022
  • To keep that low price—the store’s signature loss leader—Costco has begun to work outside the four-way oligopoly of big chicken companies.
    Boyce Upholt, The New Republic, 19 Sep. 2022
  • Visa signed the Roundtable letter championing customers, but is part of a payments oligopoly.
    The Economist, 26 Dec. 2019
  • As an oligopoly, the three DRAM makers today are keeping production in check — and raking in money.
    David Staats, idahostatesman, 8 Dec. 2017
  • And this federal law transfers money from consumers as a whole to the handful of large companies composing the oligopoly that produces most of the ethanol.
    Edward Lotterman, Twin Cities, 6 May 2017
  • No other market in the world is left to function with so little oversight and with such asymmetrical terms in favor of an oligopoly.
    Maritza Johnson, Fortune, 28 Feb. 2022
  • The members of this oligopoly will continue to compete fiercely to tie up the best talent with extravagant long-term contracts.
    Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, 9 Sep. 2019
  • The fossil fuels that powered the 20th century were produced by oligopolies, fed into centralised networks and sold on the premise of scarcity.
    The Economist, 15 Mar. 2018
  • Such an oligopoly gives producers the ability to create scarcity, causing prices to rise.
    Phillip Braun, Forbes, 29 Oct. 2021
  • The hearing-aid oligopoly and a cartel of medical professionals have long fought direct-to-consumer sales.
    The Editorial Board, WSJ, 14 July 2021
  • But surely trust, like honor, exists in crime syndicates and closed oligopolies too.
    Virginia Heffernan, WIRED, 21 Mar. 2023
  • The last change is that companies’ profits have soared, which partly reflects a decline in competition in the economy and the rise of oligopolies in many industries.
    The Economist, 13 July 2017
  • The idea that the credit card industry is a static oligopoly in dire need of more regulation is completely mistaken.
    Ike Brannon, Forbes, 3 Aug. 2022
  • But the market could go from cut-throat competition to oligopoly to state control with extraordinary speed.
    The Economist, 7 June 2018
  • Indeed, monopoly and oligopoly can be very pro-worker under the right circumstances.
    Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 3 Oct. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'oligopoly.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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