13.11: Introduction to Public Goods and Externalities
- Page ID
- 48466
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What you’ll learn to do: define and give examples of public goods and externalities
Figure 1. Roads are an example of a public good.
We’ve learned that free markets are socially optimal (or more specifically, allocatively efficient) because they provide the quantity of output that maximizes the social surplus. In this section, we will learn about how markets for certain products, i.e. public goods and goods with externalities, can fail to provide the socially optimal quantity of a product.
Contributors and Attributions
CC licensed content, Original
- Introduction to Public Goods and Externalities. Authored by: Steven Greenlaw and Lumen Learning. License: CC BY: Attribution
CC licensed content, Shared previously
- highway and traffic. Authored by: MichaelGaida. Provided by: Pixabay. Located at: https://pixabay.com/en/highway-auto-traffic-road-drive-1767107/. License: Public Domain: No Known Copyright