Lecture Economics (19/e) - Chapter 5: Market failures: Public goods and externalities

Competitive markets usually do a remarkably effective job of allocating society’s scarce resources to their most highly valued uses. Thus, we begin this chapter by demonstrating how properly functioning markets efficiently allocate resources. We then explore what happens when markets don’t function properly. In some circumstances, economically desirable goods are not produced at all. In other situations, they are either overproduced or underproduced. This chapter focuses on these situations, which economists refer to as market failures.