Public Goods and Public Choices

By V. Ostrom, Elinor Ostrom. Alternatives for Delivering Public Services, 2019

332 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A new mode of analysis for dealing with the organization and delivery of public goods and services has developed over the last two decades. This mode of analysis, identified with public choice theory, involves the application of economic reasoning to nonmarket decisionmaking. A key element in the analysis turns upon the nature of goods and services. Characteristics which pertain to exclusion and jointness of use can be arrayed to define different types of goods and services. A public good is defined as one which is not subject to exclusion and is subject to jointness in its consumption or use. Characteristics of nonexclusion and jointness of consumption or use, create situations in which market arrangements may fail to meet individual demands for public goods. Special forms of governmental or quasi-governmental organization are required to deal with these contingencies. The problems, however, occur largely in relation to the organization of collective consumption. As long as appropriate collective consumption units are organized, several alternative options can be used for the production and delivery of public goods and services. These options include private [8] suppliers as well as governmental agencies serving as suppliers.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61e341e45c45afdb07e9b5ba7770422e81ee63e2

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. M. D. Angelis
2. Thore Graepel
3. Joel Z. Leibo
4. Karl Tuyls
5. Vinícius Flores Zambaldi
6. Julien Pérolat

Citations in the corpus

• A multi-agent reinforcement learning model of common-pool resource appropriation (2017, background): “Then that agent is called the owner and the resource is called a private good [30].”
• Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism (2017, background): “The one on the bottom left, low substractability and low difficulty to exclude, is what James Buchanan, writing in 1966, called ‘club goods’ (now, after Ostrom and Ostrom (1977), they are sometimes called toll goods).”