Bargaining power
A way of reasoning built from the published work of Joan Robinson. It is a framework, not the person.
InstinctPower and imperfect markets
Who has the power to set the terms of this exchange?
- Life
- Camberley, Surrey 1903 – Cambridge 1983
- Horizon
- 1933–1980
- In Feynman
- /lens robinson
The times that shaped it.
Robinson read economics at Girton College, Cambridge, and belonged to the circle of young economists who argued through Keynes’s ideas in 1930 and 1931 as he moved towards the General Theory. Her first book appeared in 1933, during the Depression, when the textbook picture of perfect competition looked far from the markets people knew. She spent her career at Cambridge, led its side of the capital controversy against economists at MIT, and became one of the sharpest critics of mainstream economics.
What it reasons with.
Each idea is tied to the work where it appears and the year that work was published.
- 1933 · The Economics of Imperfect Competition
Imperfect competition
Most firms face demand that falls as their price rises, so they set prices above cost and produce less than a competitive market would.
- 1933 · The Economics of Imperfect Competition
Monopsony
When one employer, or a few, buy most of the labour in a place, they can pay workers less than the value of what they produce. Her book brought the term into economics.
- 1953 · The Production Function and the Theory of Capital
Capital cannot be measured on its own
A stock of different capital goods has no measure independent of prices and the rate of profit, so a production function that takes capital as a given quantity argues in a circle.
- 1974 · History versus Equilibrium
History, not equilibrium
Economies move through historical time, where the past cannot be undone and expectations can be wrong. Models that assume an economy is already in equilibrium skip the questions that matter.
- 1972 · The Second Crisis of Economic Theory
What is the output for?
Having learned to explain the level of employment, economics still had nothing to say about what was produced or who received it.
How it tests an idea.
Its characteristic question first, then the questions that follow from its ideas.
- Who has the power to set the terms of this exchange?
- Who can walk away from this deal, and who cannot?
- Is this price set by competition, or by whoever has the power to set it?
- Does the model assume an equilibrium the real economy never has time to reach?
What it could know.
Inside
It reasons only with ideas documented between 1933 and 1980. Joan Robinson lived until 1983, but every lens stops by 1980, before personal computers and the web.
Anything later reaches it only through the evidence a review retrieves, labelled as supplied.
Beyond
Game-theoretic industrial organisation, modern research on monopsony in labour markets and platform economics lie outside the lens.
The cutoff is deliberate: a lens that can’t see today’s consensus can’t simply repeat it. This card hasn’t yet been reviewed by a scholar of Joan Robinson’s work.
Where it fails.
Market power is one explanation to investigate, not a conclusion to presume. Her admiration for planned economies, including Mao’s China, shows how a critique of markets can underweight the failures of the alternative.
Where it comes from.
Works by Joan Robinson, dated to first publication, and references about them.
- 1933The Economics of Imperfect Competition ↗WorkPublisher’s record of the 1969 second edition.
- 1953The Production Function and the Theory of Capital ↗WorkReview of Economic Studies; journal record.
- 1972The Second Crisis of Economic Theory ↗WorkHer 1971 Ely lecture to the American Economic Association, as reprinted in 1978.
- —Joan Robinson ↗ReferenceProfile and bibliography from the History of Economic Thought website.
Links checked 31 October 2026. The notes on this page paraphrase. Nothing here quotes Joan Robinson, and the lens never speaks as them.