. . . a product or service produced by a privately owned business and purchased to increase the utility, or satisfaction, of the buyer. The majority of the goods and services consumed in a market economy are private goods, and their prices are determined to some degree by the market forces of supply and demand. Pure private goods are both excludable and rivalrous, where excludability means that producers can prevent some people from consuming the good or service based on their ability or willingness to pay and rivalrous indicates that one person’s consumption of a product reduces the amount available for consumption by another. In practice, private goods exist along a continuum of excludability and rivalry and can even exhibit only one of these characteristics.
The absence of excludability and rivalry introduces market failures that ensure that some goods and services cannot be efficiently provided by markets. Public goods, such as streetlights or national defense, exhibit nonexcludable and nonrivalrous characteristics. In a private market economy, such goods lead to a free-rider problem, in which consumers enjoy the benefits of the good or service without paying for it. These goods are thus unprofitable and inefficient to produce in a private market and must be provided by the government.
failure of a market to deliver an optimal result. In particular, the economic theory of market failure seeks to account for inefficient outcomes in markets that otherwise conform to the assumptions about markets held by neoclassical economics (i.e., markets that feature perfect competition, symmetrical information, and completeness). When failure happens, less welfare is created than could be created given the available resources. The social task then becomes to correct the failure.
The theory of market failure is at the heart of several economic analyses that support government action (intervention) in markets for goods and services or that justify outright government production. Many social welfare programs find their theoretical justification in market failure or in other violations of the standard market assumptions.
Criticism of the market failure notion and of using government to remedy market failure’s effects has been articulated in the public choice school of economics. Public choice scholarship has had great impact on contemporary reforms of the public sector, replacing the Keynesian economics logics that drove much public service expansion. Such critiques have led to reforms seeking to replace governments with markets to challenge or remedy market failure.
The theory: The descriptions of market failure were developed in the middle of the 20th century as part of a larger school of Keynesian welfare and macroeconomics. Important contributors included Arthur C. Pigou, Francis Bator, William Baumol, and Paul A. Samuelson. Those theorists were concerned with the correspondence between free market outcomes and social welfare optimization. In standard economics the “invisible hand,” or duality, theorem holds that laissez-faire market performance and Pareto optimality go hand in hand. When consumers and producers respond to price signals, they make their own decisions about whether to buy or sell and how to produce the good. The aggregate of those choices is the same as the Pareto optimal, or socially optimal, distribution. Pareto optimality—which takes its name from Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto—is attained when it is impossible to find an alternative that would make one actor better off while keeping all others as well off as before. Welfare economists were concerned with conditions under which that correspondence failed and sought to describe such conditions.
- Public Goods:
. . . economics, a product or service that is non-excludable and nondepletable (or “non-rivalrous”).
A good is non-excludable if one cannot exclude individuals from enjoying its benefits when the good is provided. A good is nondepletable if one individual’s enjoyment of the good does not diminish the amount of the good available to others. For example, clean air is (for all practical purposes) a public good, because its use by one individual does not (for all practical purposes) deplete the stock available to other individuals, and there is no way to exclude an individual from consuming it, if it exists. Another common example is national defense, because it is assumed that a nation-state cannot choose to protect just some of its residents from foreign aggression while excluding others from that protection; so too, providing one resident with national defense does not diminish the protection being provided to other residents. A public bad is similarly defined to be a “bad” that is non-excludable and nondepletable. For example, polluted air is a public bad, for the same reasons that clean air is a public good.
Public goods contrast with private goods, which are both excludable and depletable. Food is a straightforward example of a private good: one person’s consumption of a piece of food deprives others of consuming it (hence, it is depletable), and it is possible to exclude some individuals from consuming it (by assigning enforceable private property rights to food items, for example). Some goods fit neatly into neither category, because they are excludable but nondepletable (such as a music concert) or are non-excludable but depletable (such as a public beach, which may become less attractive, or “depleted,” as more individuals make use of it).
Public goods (and bads) are textbook examples of goods that the market typically undersupplies (or oversupplies in the case of public bads). For example, profit-maximizing firms and self-interested individuals can be expected to choose levels of production and consumption such that the aggregate level of pollution resulting from their activities leaves everyone worse off (according to their own preferences) than if each were somehow prevented from producing or consuming as much as is individually optimal. Commonly suggested solutions to such “market failures” include taxes and subsidies or government intervention.
An important similarity exists between problems involving the provision of public goods and collective action problems—such as voting, public protest, or output restriction in the case of oligopolists—where an individual typically cannot be prevented from benefiting from the achievement of the goal of the collective action, if it is achieved.
