Amazon: A story of accumulation through intellectual rentiership and predation

RIKAP, CECILIA

Competition & Change

SAGE

Año: 2020

1024-5294

Thisarticle elaborates on the intellectual monopoly theory as a form of predationand rentiership using Amazon as a case study. By analysing Amazon?s financialstatements, scientific publications and patents we show that Amazon?s economic power heavily relies on its systematic innovationsand capacity to centralize and analyse customized data that orients itsbusiness and innovations. We demonstrate how Amazon?s innovation activitieshave evolved over time with growing importance of technologies related to dataand machine learning. We also map Amazon?s innovation networks with academicinstitutions and companies. With reference to intellectual monopoly theory andwith focus on predation and rentiership, we show how Amazon appropriatesintellectual rents from these networks and from technological cooperation withother intellectual monopolies. We demonstrate that Amazon, as other data-drivenmonopolies, predates value from suppliers and third-party companiesparticipating in its platform.Onestriking characteristic of Amazon is the low rate of reported profits. Thecentrality of innovations leads us to suggest an alternative calculation thatshows that Amazon?s profits are not as low as they appear in Annual Reports. Wealso argue that lower profits are coherent with Amazon?s rentiership andpredatory strategy since they contribute to avoid excessive market poweraccusations. Finally, the paper preliminary elaborates on: i) thecomplementarities between financial and intellectual rentierism, and ii) howdata-driven intellectual monopoly expands big corporations? political power.Going beyond the specific case of Amazon, we thus contribute to a betterunderstanding of the role of lead firms and power dynamics within innovationnetworks.