Нарық сәтсіздігі: себептері мен салдары

Concept in public goods economics

In neoclassical economics, market failure is a situation in which the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not Pareto efficient, often leading to a net loss of economic value. The first known use of the term by economists was in 1958, but the concept has been traced back to the Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick. Market failures are often associated with public goods, time inconsistent preferences, information asymmetries, non competitive markets, principal–agent problems, or externalities. The existence of a market failure is often the reason that self regulatory organizations, governments or supra national institutions intervene in a particular market. Economists, especially microeconomists, are often concerned with the causes of market failure and possible means of correction. Such analysis plays an important role in many types of public policy decisions and studies. However, government policy interventions, such as taxes, subsidies, wage and price controls, and regulations, may also lead to an inefficient allocation of resources, sometimes called government failure. Most mainstream economists believe that there are circumstances (like building codes fire safety regulations or endangered species) in which it is possible for government or other organizations to improve the inefficient market outcome. Several heterodox schools of thought disagree with this as a matter of ideology. An ecological market failure exists when human activity in a market economy is exhausting critical non renewable resources, disrupting fragile ecosystems, or overloading biospheric waste absorption capacities. In none of these cases does the criterion of Pareto efficiency obtain. monopsonies, or monopolistic competition, if the agent does not implement perfect price discrimination. It is then a further question about what circumstances allow a monopoly to arise. In some cases, monopolies can maintain themselves where there are "barriers to entry" that prevent other companies from effectively entering and competing in an industry or market. Or there could exist significant first mover advantages in the market that make it difficult for other firms to compete. Moreover, monopoly can be a result of geographical conditions created by huge distances or isolated locations. This leads to a situation where there are only few communities scattered across a vast territory with only one supplier. Australia is an example that meets this description. A natural monopoly is a firm whose per unit cost decreases as it increases output; in this situation it is most efficient (from a cost perspective) to have only a single producer of a good. Natural monopolies display so called increasing returns to scale. It means that at all possible outputs marginal cost needs to be below average cost if average cost is declining. One of the reasons is the existence of fixed costs, which must be paid without considering the amount of output, what results in a state where costs are evenly divided over more units leading to the reduction of cost per unit.

Some markets can fail due to the nature of the goods being exchanged. For instance, some goods can display the attributes of public goods wherein sellers are unable to exclude non buyers from using a product, as in the development of inventions that may spread freely once revealed, such as developing a new method of harvesting. This can cause underinvestment because developers cannot capture enough of the benefits from success to make the development effort worthwhile. This can also lead to resource depletion in the case of common pool resources, whereby the use of the resource is rival but non excludable, there is no incentive for users to conserve the resource. An example of this is a lake with a natural supply of fish: if people catch the fish faster than the fish can reproduce, then the fish population will dwindle until there are no fish left for future generations.

A good or service could also have significant externalities,). Externalities can be positive or negative depending on how a good/service is produced or what the good/service provides to the public. Positive externalities tend to be goods like vaccines, schools, or advancement of technology. They usually provide the public with a positive gain. Negative externalities would be like noise or air pollution. Coase shows this with his example of the case Sturges v. Bridgman it involved a confectioner and doctor. The confectioner had lived there many years and soon the doctor several years into residency decides to build a consulting room; it is right by the confectioner’s kitchen which releases vibrations from his grinding of pestle and mortar ( ). The doctor wins the case by a claim of nuisance so the confectioner would have to cease from using his machine. Coase argues there could have been bargains instead the confectioner could have paid the doctor to continue the source of income from using the machine hopefully it is more than what the Doctor is losing ( ). Vice versa the doctor could have paid the confectioner to cease production since he is prohibiting a source of income from the confectioner. Coase used a few more examples similar in scope dealing with social cost of an externality and the possible resolutions. Traffic congestion is an example of market failure that incorporates both non excludability and externality. Public roads are common resources that are available for the entire population's use (non excludable), and act as a complement to cars (the more roads there are, the more useful cars become). Because there is very low cost but high benefit to individual drivers in using the roads, the roads become congested, decreasing their usefulness to society. Furthermore, driving can impose hidden costs on society through pollution (externality). Solutions for this include public transportation, congestion pricing, tolls, and other ways of making the driver include the social cost in the decision to drive. and moral hazard. Most commonly, information asymmetries are studied in the context of principal–agent problems. George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph E. Stiglitz developed the idea and shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics.

In Models of Man, Herbert A. Simon points out that most people are only partly rational, and are emotional/irrational in the remaining part of their actions. In another work, he states "boundedly rational agents experience limits in formulating and solving complex problems and in processing (receiving, storing, retrieving, transmitting) information" (Williamson, p. 553, citing Simon). Simon describes a number of dimensions along which "classical" models of rationality can be made somewhat more realistic, while sticking within the vein of fairly rigorous formalization. These include:
limiting what sorts of utility functions there might be. recognizing the costs of gathering and processing information. the possibility of having a "vector" or "multi valued" utility function. Simon suggests that economic agents employ the use of heuristics to make decisions rather than a strict rigid rule of optimization. They do this because of the complexity of the situation, and their inability to process and compute the expected utility of every alternative action. Deliberation costs might be high and there are often other, concurrent economic activities also requiring decisions.

The Coase theorem, developed by Ronald Coase and labeled as such by George Stigler, states that private transactions are efficient as long as property rights exist, only a small number of parties are involved, and transactions costs are low. Additionally, this efficiency will take place regardless of who owns the property rights. This theory comes from a section of Coase's Nobel prize winning work The Problem of Social Cost. While the assumptions of low transactions costs and a small number of parties involved may not always be applicable in real world markets, Coase's work changed the long held belief that the owner of property rights was a major determining factor in whether or not a market would fail. The Coase theorem points out when one would expect the market to function properly even when there are externalities. <blockquote>A market is an institution in which individuals or firms exchange not just commodities, but the rights to use them in particular ways for particular amounts of time. [ ] Markets are institutions which organize the exchange of control of commodities, where the nature of the control is defined by the property rights attached to the commodities. Nonetheless, views still differ on whether something displaying these attributes is meaningful without the information provided by the market price system.

Macroeconomic business cycles are a part of the market. They are characterized by constant downswings and upswings which influence economic activity. Therefore, this situation requires some kind of government intervention. which can be in the "public interest", as well as in interests of stakeholders with equity. Inefficiency only arises when means are chosen by individuals that are inconsistent with their desired goals. This definition of efficiency differs from that of Pareto efficiency, and forms the basis of the theoretical argument against the existence of market failures. However, providing that the conditions of the first welfare theorem are met, these two definitions agree, and give identical results. Austrians argue that the market tends to eliminate its inefficiencies through the process of entrepreneurship driven by the profit motive; something the government has great difficulty detecting, or correcting.

Objections also exist on more fundamental bases, such as Marxian analysis. Colloquial uses of the term "market failure" reflect the notion of a market "failing" to provide some desired attribute different from efficiency – for instance, high levels of inequality can be considered a "market failure", yet are not Pareto inefficient, and so would not be considered a market failure by mainstream
economics.