1. THE PERFECTLY COMPETITIVE PRODUCTION OF COLLECTIVE GOODS.
- Author
-
Thompson, Earl A.
- Subjects
FREE enterprise ,ECONOMICS ,PERFECT competition ,PRIVATE sector ,MARKETS - Abstract
Since the days of economist Adam Smith, economic theorists have treated collective goods, goods whose benefits can be enjoyed concurrently by everyone, as if their production were the unavoidable responsibility of the public sector. This treatment of collective goods has permitted increasingly complete theoretical demonstrations of the efficiency of perfect competition in the private sector. It is of both theoretical and practical interest to examine the efficiency of a competitive, free enterprise economy which produces and sells both private goods and collective goods. This paper concentrates on perfect markets. In particular, it assumes throughout the formal analysis that there is perfect knowledge of all market-relevant information and perfect exclusion. Perfect exclusion exists when any possessor of a collective good can demand a fee from each individual on the basis of a freely enforceable threat to exclude that individual from receiving the benefit of, or using, the collective good.
- Published
- 1968
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