private good

private good, 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.

Inefficiency in the production and consumption of private goods can also arise when there are spillover effects, or externalities. A positive externality exists if the production and consumption of a good or service benefits a third party not directly involved in the market transaction. For example, education directly benefits the individual and also provides benefits to society as a whole through the provision of more informed and productive citizens. Private markets will underproduce in the presence of such positive externalities because the costs of production for the firm are overstated and the profits are understated. A negative externality exists when the production or consumption of a product by one party results in a cost to a another party. Air and noise pollution are commonly cited examples of negative externalities. When negative externalities are present, private markets will overproduce because the costs of production for the firm are understated and profits are overstated.

A number of fairness and justice issues arise with respect to private goods. As excludability implies that consumers will get different amounts of goods and services, a complete reliance on private markets is unacceptable for basic necessities, such as food and safe drinking water, especially when there is wide disparity in income distribution. Similarly, although health care may be provided more efficiently as a private good, the poor and those without health insurance may be unable to afford it. Many argue that access to health care is a human right and that it should thus be provided by the government as a public good. Issues such as these illustrate the trade-off between efficiency and equity and highlight the need for public policy to determine which private goods should be public goods.

Raymond Geuss, Public Goods, Private Goods (2001).