public good

public good, in 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. In such cases, the achievement of the goal can be thought of as a non-excludable good. Consequently, it is often thought that individuals may have little incentive to contribute to its achievement—by turning out to vote or participating in a protest—if they view the act of contribution as in itself costly and unlikely to have a significant impact on whether the collective goal is achieved.

Kenneth A. Shepsle, Analyzing Politics: Rationality, Behavior, and Institutions, 2nd ed. (2010); Richard Tuck, Free Riding (2008).