Winner-take-all
Etymology
The phrase comes from electoral politics, where a "winner-take-all" system awards all of a district’s or state’s seats to the plurality winner. It was carried into economics by Robert Frank and Philip Cook in their 1995 book The Winner-Take-All Society, building on Sherwin Rosen’s earlier "economics of superstars." Digital platforms, where distribution is nearly free and reputation compounds, have made the dynamic far more common than when the term was coined.
adjective · /WIN-ur tayk AWL/
Describing a market or contest where tiny differences in quality or luck translate into vastly disproportionate rewards for those at the very top.
What it names
Why the best-selling author, the top app, and the star performer capture rewards wildly out of scale with their edge over the runner-up — a structure, amplified by technology and networks, that concentrates gains at the peak.
Example
Streaming turned music into a winner-take-all market, where a handful of tracks soak up the plays and everyone else fights over the crumbs.
Related idea
The Matthew effect describes the compounding "the rich get richer" mechanism by which early advantage snowballs; winner-take-all describes the resulting payoff structure, where that snowball leaves almost everything at the top.