Exploitation is using a superior negotiating position to inflict great costs on someone else, at small cost to yourself.
I think the word exploitation as it’s generally used, is about one party getting a benefit at the expense of another party. It’s not about one party getting nothing/pays a small cost while the other party suffers a lot.
Promoting an alternative definition of what it means to exploit is likely going to make reasoning harder. Google suggests as definition for exploit “make use of (a situation) in a way considered unfair or underhand”.
Wage theft is a clear example of exploitation. For many jobs, there’s information asymmetry where the person seeking the job does not get informed fully about how his job will be before they accept the job, that’s also clearly exploitation. Multiple-level marketing companies like Amway are exploitative because they mislead people about the likely results of working for them.
In general, there’s value created through trade. If one party captures nearly all of the surplus value of the trade, many people consider that unfair and thus exploitative.
A key aspect of your examples is further that total utility might not be maximized and because one party has little power, utility maximizing trades don’t happen. That’s a different issue from how the trade surplus is distributed.
If people complain about Amazon, to my knowledge most of the people complain that while Amazon runs very efficient and is run to maximize total utility, they capture most of the generated value and don´t pay their employees very much.
Maybe, economists do have a term for the case where one party being powerless leads to utility not being maximized?
I think the word exploitation as it’s generally used, is about one party getting a benefit at the expense of another party. It’s not about one party getting nothing/pays a small cost while the other party suffers a lot.
Promoting an alternative definition of what it means to exploit is likely going to make reasoning harder. Google suggests as definition for exploit “make use of (a situation) in a way considered unfair or underhand”.
Wage theft is a clear example of exploitation. For many jobs, there’s information asymmetry where the person seeking the job does not get informed fully about how his job will be before they accept the job, that’s also clearly exploitation. Multiple-level marketing companies like Amway are exploitative because they mislead people about the likely results of working for them.
In general, there’s value created through trade. If one party captures nearly all of the surplus value of the trade, many people consider that unfair and thus exploitative.
A key aspect of your examples is further that total utility might not be maximized and because one party has little power, utility maximizing trades don’t happen. That’s a different issue from how the trade surplus is distributed.
If people complain about Amazon, to my knowledge most of the people complain that while Amazon runs very efficient and is run to maximize total utility, they capture most of the generated value and don´t pay their employees very much.
Maybe, economists do have a term for the case where one party being powerless leads to utility not being maximized?