Public Goods

Resources that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable — one person’s use doesn’t diminish availability, and access cannot be restricted.

Classic examples: national defense, street lighting, knowledge, open-source software. Public goods face under-provision because individuals can free-ride on others’ contributions. This creates collective action problems requiring institutional solutions.

Systems Connection

Public goods represent a failure of simple market feedback: without excludability, producers cannot capture value, so flows of investment are insufficient. Solutions require alternative governance structures — taxation, voluntary coordination, or mechanism design that creates artificial excludability.

Digital Public Goods

Cryptoeconomic systems create new models for public goods funding:

• Quadratic funding (matching with democratic weighting)
• Retroactive public goods funding
• Token-curated registries

See Also

• Political Economy — parent domain
• Commons — related resource type (rivalrous)
• Collective Action — the provision problem
• Mechanism Design — solutions