Re:Amazon is sued over warehouses after New York worker brin...
by CoffeeDregs on Thursday June 04, 2020 @11:40AM
(#23418082)
This is an excellent point and one I had not considered.
I'm generally anti-intervention but do strongly support the notion of driving diversity-of-business within markets. A common measure of market concentration is a sum of squares of market-share percentages (see: https://www.justice.gov/atr/herfindahl-hirschman-index). I'm not sure exactly what to do about this right now but I would suspect Amazon is a huge percentage of the distribution-to-the-home market so should be looked at closely. Their position could be good if they provide excellent Covid policies/procedures (and would be much worse to have a large diversity of participants with poor Covid P&Ps), but could be quite bad if people got scared of Amazon and effectively shutdown-by-virtue-of-disuse a large percentage of the distribution infrastructure in the US...
I'm generally anti-intervention but do strongly support the notion of driving diversity-of-business within markets. A common measure of market concentration is a sum of squares of market-share percentages (see: https://www.justice.gov/atr/herfindahl-hirschman-index). I'm not sure exactly what to do about this right now but I would suspect Amazon is a huge percentage of the distribution-to-the-home market so should be looked at closely. Their position could be good if they provide excellent Covid policies/procedures (and would be much worse to have a large diversity of participants with poor Covid P&Ps), but could be quite bad if people got scared of Amazon and effectively shutdown-by-virtue-of-disuse a large percentage of the distribution infrastructure in the US...