Public good provision, punishment, cooperation, and defection Essay - 1

Public good provision, punishment, cooperation, and defection - Essay Example Along with it, in case of public good consumption, no one has the right to exclude some other individual from consuming the good. In practice, it would be difficult to find out such goods which are non-rivaled as well as non-excluded in an absolute term. However, economists generally think that although absolute non-rivaled and non-excluded goods are non-existent, there exist some goods which have the feature that approximate the concept of public goods. The paper addresses both the problems and necessity of public goods, generation of negative emotions owing to free riders and the necessity of punishments. In case of understanding the problem relating to the public good provisioning, it is necessary to build up clear understanding regarding public good. Some examples can be used here to understand the features of public goods and why it efficient provisioning seems to be so problematic. For the purpose of easy understanding let us consider the case where a person is drinking one glass of milk. Once he finishes his drinking there will remain no milk in the glass for the other person to consume. Therefore, any other person is getting excluded from consumption of the milk in the glass. Therefore, this one glass of milk is a rivaled and excluded good. In contrast, let us assume the case of breathing air. It is a well known fact that breathing air can not be reduced significantly by the consumption of it by some person. Therefore other persons can easily get access to this breathing air, and non one can be excluded from breathing. So, breathing air can be regarded as non-rivaled and non-excluded good. But there is no such problem in the provision of breathing air since it is a natural resources. No cost goes into its production. These are known as free goods. But thing is not same for all the non-rivaled and non-exclude goods. All public goods are not free goods. For a large set of public goods, huge