Shared Consumption: A Technological Analysis
Working Paper No. 03-W01R
John A. Weymark
ABSTRACT [article]
James Buchanan (Economica, 1966) has argued that Alfred Marshall's theory of jointly-supplied goods can be extended to analyze the allocation of
impure public goods. This article introduces a way of modelling sharing
technologies for jointly-supplied goods that captures the essential
features of Buchanan's proposal. Public and private goods are special
cases of shared goods obtained by appropriately specifying the sharing
technology. Necessary conditions for an allocation in a shared goods
economy to be Pareto optimal are identified and related to the optimality
conditions for public and private goods.
Keywords and Phrases: Impure public goods, shared goods, Pareto optimality
JEL Classification Number: H41