Created Value, Captured Rent: Did Jeff Bezos Become Rich at the Expense of Customers and Employees?

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_22How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Amazon; Jeff Bezos; economic rent; consumer surplus; labour power; market power; consent

Abstract

This paper examines whether Jeff Bezos became rich at the expense of Amazon’s customers and employees. It operationalises value-creating profit and economic rent through counterfactual indicators: persistent price or markup gaps after cost and quality controls, worker total compensation relative to feasible alternatives, and consumer surplus net of search, switching, and consent costs. Amazon created substantial value through convenience, logistics, product variety, and cloud computing, so Bezos’s wealth cannot be reduced to a zero-sum transfer. Employee evidence shows wage gains alongside intensive monitoring and lower job quality, but existing studies do not establish whether pay and benefits fully offset injury and psychological costs. The incidence of Amazon’s wage floor is also unresolved because costs may be absorbed in margins, passed to consumers, or shifted through supplier terms. Marketplace power is most plausible where rival exit, weak outside options, or platform control reduces contestability, although effects vary by country and product category. The evidence therefore supports substantial value creation alongside credible but unquantified channels of rent capture.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinuo Li
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/11/10
TI  - Created Value, Captured Rent: Did Jeff Bezos Become Rich at the Expense of Customers and Employees?
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Public Service, Economic Management and Sustainable Development (PESD 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 223
EP  - 229
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_22
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_22
ID  - Li2026
ER  -