How to Use oligopoly in a Sentence

oligopoly

noun
  • This is precisely the kind of oligopoly that the antitrust laws were meant to prevent.
    — Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, 19 Dec. 2019
  • How long can this odd pairing of socialism and oligopoly persist?
    — Joel Kotkin, Orange County Register, 4 June 2017
  • And the unchanging ranks at the top of the industry suggest an oligopoly.
    — Rakesh Kumar, Fortune, 13 June 2023
  • Apple could miss the quarter because of the oligopoly and be revealed to be too expensive a stock.
    — Jim Cramer, CNBC, 28 June 2026
  • But against that, consider that Micron is part of an oligopoly in memory chips.
    — John Dorfman, Forbes, 16 May 2022
  • The goal of the decrees was to fight oligopolies by limiting studio control over movie theaters.
    — Steven Zeitchik, Washington Post, 22 Nov. 2019
  • 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
  • Such an oligopoly gives producers the ability to create scarcity, causing prices to rise.
    — Phillip Braun, Forbes, 29 Oct. 2021
  • 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
  • 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
  • Visa signed the Roundtable letter championing customers, but is part of a payments oligopoly.
    — The Economist, 26 Dec. 2019
  • In freer places, upstarts are challenging oligopoly as much as officialdom.
    — The Economist, 14 July 2018
  • 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
  • Instead, consumers have to make do with higher-charging local oligopolies.
    — The Economist, 12 Sep. 2019
  • Indeed, monopoly and oligopoly can be very pro-worker under the right circumstances.
    — Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 3 Oct. 2023
  • 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
  • But a casual observer still might not consider the housing market as an oligopoly.
    — Andrew Van Dam, Washington Post, 17 Oct. 2019
  • 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 hearing-aid oligopoly and a cartel of medical professionals have long fought direct-to-consumer sales.
    — The Editorial Board, WSJ, 14 July 2021
  • This has generally led to oligopolies that enjoy fat profits but do little to lower prices and lift quality for patients.
    — The Economist, 4 Nov. 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
  • 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
  • In a media system that has veered back to following Hollywood’s yellow brick rules of the road, the new oligopolies are an awful lot like the old ones.
    — Matthew Jordan, The Conversation, 12 Dec. 2025
  • 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
  • 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
  • Lax antitrust enforcement has let American firms form oligopolies and pass the gains to shareholders, not consumers.
    — The Economist, 2 Nov. 2017
  • By traditional metrics of these things, monopoly, oligopoly, there’s definitely a very high bar.
    — Cynthia Littleton, Variety, 21 Feb. 2026
  • Some markets move from nascent to commodity or oligopoly almost overnight, such as consumer or end-user GenAI.
    — Mark Tauschek, Forbes, 4 Nov. 2024
  • In effect, four of the eight largest companies in the world control an online-advertising oligopoly and are denying competitors access to these services.
    — Mark Epstein, WSJ, 25 June 2018
  • 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

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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