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Hilary Rosen

Hilary Rosen (born 1958) is the former head of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). She was a columnist for The Washington Post, became the first Washington editor-at-large and political director of The Huffington Post, and has provided political commentary for CNN, CNBC, and MSNBC.

She worked for the RIAA for 16 years, including as CEO from 1998 to 2003. Since 2010, she has been a partner and managing director at the public relations firm SKDKnickerbocker. She has been a registered lobbyist during her career, both at the RIAA and for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Rosen has been an advocate for LGBT rights since the early 1980s.

Early life
Rosen was born to a Jewish family in West Orange, New Jersey in 1958. Her father worked as an insurance agent and her mother was the city's first councilwoman. In high school, Rosen served as student council president. She earned her bachelor's degree in international business from George Washington University in 1981. Her parents divorced while Rosen was at college.

Career
In 1979, Rosen began working as a legislative assistant in the Washington, D.C. office of Governor Brendan Byrne (D-NJ), who was a friend of Rosen's mother. She also worked for Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ) early in her career. Rosen worked for the lobbying firm Liz Robbins Associates in the 1980s.

Recording Industry Association of America
In 1987, Rosen joined the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the trade organization representing the American recording industry, as its first government relations director. In 1989, she and her colleague Jay Berman updated the Parental Advisory label and launched its public awareness campaign. In 1992, she took a brief leave from the RIAA to serve as Senator Dianne Feinstein's transition director and set up the California Democratic Party's office in Washington, D.C.

As a registered lobbyist from 1999 to 2003, Rosen influenced the decisions made by Congress on behalf of nearly 350 companies and thousands of artists represented by the RIAA. In 1995, Rosen supported artists' rights when Bob Dole, then Senate Majority Leader, criticized Time Warner and said that rap lyrics promoted violence and were degrading to women. She became the organization's president and chief operating officer in May 1996. Rosen was a strong supporter of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which became law in 1998, to prohibit the creation of technologies used to get around copyright protections. Rosen was promoted to the role of chief executive officer in 1998. In 1999, the RIAA Diamond certification was awarded for the first time, recognizing albums that have shipped more than 10 million copies. Rosen said the award, which was named as such because "diamonds are valuable [and] no two are alike", represented "a quantum leap" for the music industry and an expansion of the national music market.

In 2000, the American musical recording company A&M Records along with several others, through the RIAA, sued Napster on grounds of copyright infringement under the DMCA, which led to the shutting down of the pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing service. As the face of the RIAA, Rosen was vilified by proponents of free file sharing, and even traveled with security at one point because she was receiving death threats. Nonetheless, Rosen encouraged partnerships between the recording industry and online music businesses, and consulted on the launch of digital music services such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store. Rosen was recognized for advancing the industry's political efforts and appeared on lists of influential leaders, including Entertainment Weekly "Annual Power List" and National Journal "Washington's Powerful Insiders". She was included in The Hollywood Reporter list of the most powerful women in entertainment in 1998, 2000 (number 10), 2002 (number 17), and 2003 (number 10).

Rosen resigned from the RIAA in June 2003 to spend more time with her family. Following her resignation, she reportedly "questioned the value of lawsuits against individual downloaders" said she had attempted to "push the industry to evolve". In 2007, she said, "I won't be a George Tenet here, but it's pretty well known that I was impatient with the pace of the industry's embrace of online distribution of music. There's no substitute for speed when times are dire. The record companies had valid reasons for their caution, but that caution let the situation get out of hand."

Media roles
Rosen is a Democratic strategist and political pundit. She was a regular political columnist for The Washington Post, has authored articles for many national publications, and provided political commentary for CNBC and MSNBC. In 2008, she became a CNN contributor, appearing on regular programming as well as special political coverage. Also, in 2008, Rosen became the first Washington editor-at-large and political director of  The Huffington Post. In 2010, she and The Huffington Post, which was editorially critical of BP following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, reached a mutual decision to part ways when Rosen's firm, Brunswick Group, began consulting for the British oil and gas company. In April 2012, Rosen was criticized for saying that Ann Romney had "never worked a day in her life" when discussing Mitt Romney's reliance on his wife as an adviser on women's issues during a CNN appearance. Rosen apologized the next day. In 2013, Rosen began writing for The Washington Post as an opinion contributor.

According to the New York Times, Rosen bought over half a million fake Twitter followers. Rosen described it as "an experiment I did several years ago to see how it worked"; however, records indicate Rosen made dozens of purchases between 2015 and 2017.

Communications consultant
In 2006, Rosen and Jay Berman, who formerly worked at RIAA, briefly ran the firm Berman Rosen Global Strategies, consulting for tech companies such as Facebook, Viacom, and XM. In 2008, she joined the public relations firm Brunswick Group to head its Washington, D.C. office. In 2010, Rosen became a partner and managing director at the political communications and public relations firm SKDKnickerbocker, leading the company alongside Anita Dunn. The firm is known for its work on progressive issues and focuses on Democrats in its political work. The firm also is employed by TransCanada Corporation to improve their public relations. As a communications consultant, Rosen attended the White House on multiple occasions during Barack Obama's presidency. At least five meetings were with the president to discuss messaging around his health care reform plans. Following her 2012 comments regarding Ann Romney, Rosen was the subject of critical coverage by some media outlets, which noted White House visitor logs and speculated whether Rosen or SKDKnickerbocker employees were operating as "unofficial" or "unregistered" lobbyists. Rosen has advised many national candidates, and in 2012 The Wall Street Journal reported that she was consulting with Debbie Wasserman Schultz during her time as chair of the Democratic National Committee. SKDKnickerbocker was selected by Edie Windsor's legal team to lead the public relations efforts behind the challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act (United States v. Windsor, 2013). In 2014, Rosen and Dunn served as senior advisors to the LGBT rights group Americans for Marriage Equality. Planned Parenthood hired Rosen to help manage the 2015 undercover videos controversy. Rosen and SKDKnickerbocker were assisting Susan G. Komen for the Cure with a public relations campaign for an environmental research initiative when the Planned Parenthood controversy arose.

Controversies
During the campaigning leading up to the 2012 United States presidential election, Rosen criticized Ann Romney, wife of then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney, claiming that, as a stay-at-home mother, Romney "never worked a day in her life." Rosen was pressured to apologize when her remarks were condemned by the Democratic National Committee and President Obama, who stated he had "little patience for commentary about the spouses of political candidates." Michelle Obama also distanced herself from Rosen, expressing on Twitter that "every mother works hard, and every woman deserves to be respected."

Rosen was criticized in December 2017 for making two tweets calling several Georgetown Hoyas fans "anti-Semitic," singling one out as a "bigot" after she noticed a photograph of a fan wearing a bacon costume. After Rosen was told that the fan in question was known as "bacon man" and wore the costume because of his last name (Bakan, pronounced "bacon"), she apologized.

In January 2018, Rosen admitted she bought more than 500,000 fake Twitter followers as "an experiment," to see whether to recommend the practice to her PR clients.

In March 2020 she was criticized for telling Bernie Sanders presidential campaign chair Nina Turner that she had "no standing" to compare Senator Joe Biden to the disappointing "white moderate", a reference to a statement by Martin Luther King Jr., in his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham jail. Rosen also mistakenly corrected Turner, stating that King only objected to the 'silence' of the "white moderate" not the comfort of the 'white moderate' with the status quo as Turner had stated. In fact Dr. King stated that "the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice" was more of an obstacle to freedom than the Ku Klux Klanner. She apologized on Twitter in a now deleted tweet, stating "Pls no need to defend me and attack angry black women. They have standing. I always need to listen more than I talk. We rise together.". Rosen was subsequently derided for her use of the pejorative phrase "angry black women" which is a racial trope. Rosen then apologized a second time on Twitter stating that she was "humbly sorry" and would never refer to Nina Turner as an 'angry black woman' and only wanted people who were using the phrase against Ms. Turner to stop.

LGBT advocacy
Rosen became an LGBT activist starting in 1982 when she and others demanded federal intervention to combat HIV/AIDS in the United States. She outed herself to members of Congress in an attempt to win HIV/AIDS funding.

In 2004, she managed the successful campaign to defeat George W. Bush's proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning same-sex marriage. Her work on this campaign is profiled in John Harwood and Gerald Seib's book Pennsylvania Avenue: Profiles in Backroom Power (2008).

Between 2004 and 2008, Rosen was a registered lobbyist for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT civil rights advocacy group and political lobbying organization in the United States. In 2008, she served as interim director for the organization. She also served on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation board. The Advocate included Rosen in their "People of the Year" list in 2008.

Rosen consulted on the Hollingsworth v. Perry (originally Perry v. Schwarzenegger) series of federal court cases that legalized same-sex marriage in California. Rosen was included in The Advocate "Out100" list for her work on the "Respect for Marriage Coalition" media campaign during the Defense of Marriage Act challenge and United States v. Windsor civil rights case. She was also named one of the 25 "most powerful LGBT players" in Washington, D.C., by National Journal and ranked number 62 in Out 2012 "Power List". National Journal included Rosen in their list of the "30 Most Influential Out Washingtonians" in 2014.

Inspired by Showtime's LGBT television series The L Word, Rosen collaborated with the show's creator to establish OurChart.com, a social networking site for lesbians. Its name refers to "the chart", which was used on the show to illustrate the relationships between characters. The site was defunct by 2012, having been acquired by Showtime.

In 1992, she helped found Rock the Vote, a non-profit organization that encourages voter turnout among young voters.

Rosen and Tammy Haddad co-host the annual Garden Brunch prior to the White House Correspondents' Association's dinner.

Personal life
Rosen met Elizabeth Birch in 1994. Birch was a lawyer for Apple and later became the executive director of the Human Rights Campaign. The couple adopted twins from Texas in 1999. They received some criticism from conservative groups who opposed LGBT adoption. The two separated in 2006.

Rosen has lived in Washington, D.C. since her studies at George Washington University. She is well-connected and has been called a "Washington insider". Al Gore and Greta van Susteren were among guests who attended her fiftieth birthday celebration.

In addition to being a Democratic strategist, Rosen has described herself as a "strong, progressive Democrat". She has been a longtime supporter of the Democratic Party and has hosted fundraisers for candidates, including Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA). She has also been a longtime supporter of Hillary Clinton and supported President Joe Biden in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race. Her stout advocacy for Biden led her to misquote and lecture former Ohio state senator Nina Turner about the meaning of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s warning as to White moderates. She later apologized for her misstep. She has made many personal financial contributions to politicians and groups such as the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and Kennedy for Senate 2000.

title: Hilary Rosen


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Talk:Free-rider problem

Free Rider Problem in Culture and Societal Application
Suggestion: This article can become a discrete topic under social loafing if a section devoted to how the free rider problem applies in a societal context.

I think that if we analyze how different economic structures support/discourage free riders, the article would become stronger. Readers are looking for real world evidence in current events and history which point to the free rider problem. By going into established theories on how communism vs. capitalism affects free riders, and how certain cultures around the world have different effects on free riders at an individual level, (such as collectivist cultures in the East having documented lower problems with social loafing), we can create an informative article on this issue. I welcome suggestions as to how to best approach this as I plan on contributing personally to such a section in the article.

Akaychestnut 15:55 Sept 21, 2014 (EST)

The human economic migration problems (globally) seem to be good examples of how the free-rider problem can impact the decisions of large populations to migrate long distances to take advantage of the largess of more economically developed countries. There is hope that once settled, these migrants will become "net producers" and leave the ranks of free-riders. In the meantime, the existing "net producers" in the countries hosting these new economic immigrants bear the weight of paying for the increased costs of accommodating the new residents (who may be citizens, or not). As we have seen all over Europe in the last 20 years of Middle Eastern wars, the host countries have been severely strained by the increased costs and have erected considerable physical and legal barriers to unrestricted immigration (amid great criticism from advocates for free migration). The US, facing the evacuation of impoverished people from Central America moving to the US border, is struggling with this issue and has not reached consensus on the balance between altruism and self-interest of its own citizens. I would like to see an academic/economic (not political) discussion of the free-rider problem involving human migration.76.25.0.122 (talk) 18:52, 3 March 2021 (UTC) MWilliams March 3, 2021

Malibu Surfer redirects here, but isn't covered or discussed here.
The malibu surfer problem redirects here, despite being an entirely separate concept. It is not discussed or covered here and should most likely be a separate article.

Useful Additional Sources
About topic of Free-rider problem https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0266267100002480 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2601275?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Does this article still need additional verification?
If we do not not need additional verification, let's remove the template for "More citations needed". If we do need additional verification, let's specify what areas are lacking in verification. Nereocystis (talk) 18:30, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

One or the other
I don't know where to write this either, sorry. But the article defines the free rider problem as both (1) a market failure and (2) a question of how to limit free riding. Surely it should be one or the other. If so, I should be (1) because (2) seems circular. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chrisfoxinc (talk • contribs) 11:43, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

title: Talk:Free-rider problem


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Public good (economics)

In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good) is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Use by one person neither prevents access by other people, nor does it reduce availability to others. Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person. This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, its simultaneous availability to more than one person would be economically irrelevant.

Capital goods may be used to produce public goods or services that are "...typically provided on a large scale to many consumers." Similarly, using capital goods to produce public goods may result in the creation of new capital goods. In some cases, public goods or services are considered "...insufficiently profitable to be provided by the private sector.... (and), in the absence of government provision, these goods or services would be produced in relatively small quantities or, perhaps, not at all."

Public goods include knowledge, official statistics, national security, common languages, law enforcement, public parks, free roads, and many television and radio broadcasts. Flood control systems, aids to navigation, and street lighting are also common social goods. Collective goods that are spread all over the face of the Earth may be referred to as global public goods. This includes physical book literature, but also media, pictures and videos. For instance, knowledge is well shared globally. Information about men's, women's and youth health awareness, environmental issues, and maintaining biodiversity is common knowledge that every individual in the society can get without necessarily preventing others access. Also, sharing and interpreting contemporary history with a cultural lexicon (particularly about protected cultural heritage sites and monuments) is another source of knowledge that the people can freely access.

Public goods problems are often closely related to the "free-rider" problem, in which people not paying for the good may continue to access it. Thus, the good may be under-produced, overused or degraded. Public goods may also become subject to restrictions on access and may then be considered to be club goods; exclusion mechanisms include toll roads, congestion pricing, and pay television with an encoded signal that can be decrypted only by paid subscribers.

There is a good deal of debate and literature on how to measure the significance of public goods problems in an economy, and to identify the best remedies.

Academic literature on public goods
Paul A. Samuelson is usually credited as the economist who articulated the modern theory of public goods in a mathematical formalism, building on earlier work of Wicksell and Lindahl. In his classic 1954 paper The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure, he defined a public good, or as he called it in the paper a "collective consumption good", as follows:"[goods] which all enjoy in common in the sense that each individual's consumption of such a good leads to no subtractions from any other individual's consumption of that good..."

Many mechanisms have been proposed to achieve efficient public goods provision in various settings and under various assumptions.

Lindahl tax
A Lindahl tax is a type of taxation brought forward by Erik Lindahl, an economist from Sweden in 1919. His idea was to tax individuals, for the provision of a public good, according to the marginal benefit they receive. Public goods are costly and eventually someone needs to pay the cost. It is difficult to determine how much each person should pay. So, Lindahl developed a theory of how the expense of public utilities needs to be settled. His argument was that people would pay for the public goods according to the way they benefit from the good. The more a person benefits from these goods, the higher the amount they pay. People are more willing to pay for goods that they value. Taxes are needed to fund public goods and people are willing to bear the burden of taxes. Additionally, the theory dwells on people's willingness to pay for the public good. From the fact that public goods are paid through taxation according to the Lindahl idea, the basic duty of the organization that should provide the people with this services and products is the government.

Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism
Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanisms (VCG) are one of the best studied procedures for funding public goods. VCG encompasses a wide class of similar mechanisms, but most work focuses on the Clarke Pivot Rule which ensures that all individuals pay into the public good and that the mechanism is individually rational.

The main issue with the VCG mechanism is that it requires a very large amount of information from each user. Participants may not have a detailed sense of their utility function with respect to different funding levels. Compare this with other mechanisms that only require users to provide a single contribution amount. This, among other issues, has prevented the use of VCG mechanisms in practice. However, it is still possible that VCG mechanisms could be adopted among a set of sophisticated actors.

Quadratic funding
Quadratic funding (QF) is one of the newest innovations in public goods funding mechanisms. The idea of Quadratic voting was turned into a mechanism for public goods funding by Buterin, Hitzig, and Weyl and is now referred to as quadratic funding.

Quadratic funding has a close theoretical link with the VCG mechanism, and like VCG, it requires a subsidy in order to induce incentive compatibility and efficiency. Both mechanisms also fall prone to collusion between players and sybil attacks. However, in contrast to VCG, contributors only have to submit a single contribution - the total contribution to the public good is the sum of the square roots of individual contributions. It can be proved that there is always a deficit that the mechanism designer must pay.

One technique to reduce collusion is to identify groups of contributors that will likely coordinate and lower the subsidy going to their preferred causes.

Assurance contracts
First proposed by Bagnoli and Lipman, assurance contracts have a simple and intuitive appeal. Each funder agrees to spend a certain amount towards a public good conditional on the total funding being sufficient to produce the good. If not everyone agrees to the terms, then no money is spent on the project. Donors can feel assured that their money will only be spent if there is sufficient support for the public good. Assurance contracts work particularly well with smaller groups of easily identifiable participants, especially when the game can be repeated.

Several crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo have used assurance contracts to support various projects (though not all of them are public goods).

Assurance contracts can be used for non-monetary coordination as well, for example, Free State Project obtained mutual commitments for 20,000 individuals to move to New Hampshire in a bid to influence the politics of the state.

Alex Tabarrok suggested a modification called dominant assurance contracts where the mechanism designer gives every contributor a refund bonus if the contract fails. For example, in addition to returning their contributions, the mechanism designer might give all contributors an additional $5 if the total donations aren’t sufficient to support the project.

If there’s a chance that the contract will fail, a refund bonus incentivizes people to participate in the mechanism, making the all-pay equilibrium more likely. This comes with the drawback that the mechanism designer must pay the participants in some cases (e.g. when the contract fails), which is a common theme.

Zubrickas proposed a simple modification of dominant assurance contracts where people are given a refund bonus proportional to the amount they offered to donate, this incentivizes larger contributions than the fixed refund from Tabarrok’s original proposal.

There have been many variations on the idea of conditional donations towards a public good. For example, the Conditional Contributions Mechanism allows donors to make variable sized commitments to fund the project conditional on the total amount committed. Similarly, the Binary Conditional Contributions Mechanism allows users to condition their donation on the number of unique funders. Extensions such as the Street Performer Protocol consider time-limited spending commitments.

Lotteries
Lotteries have historically been used as a means to finance public goods. Morgan initiated the first formal study of lotteries as a public goods funding mechanism. Since then, lotteries have undergone extensive theoretical and experimental research. Combined with their historical success, lotteries are a promising crowdfunding mechanism. They work by using an external source of funding to provide a lottery prize. Individual “donors” buy lottery tickets for a chance to receive the cash prize, knowing that ticket sales will be spent towards the public good. A winner is selected randomly from one of the tickets and the winner receives the entire lottery prize. All lottery proceeds from ticket sales are spent towards the public good.

Like the other mechanisms, this approach requires subsidies in the form of a lottery prize in order to function. It can be shown that altruistic donors can generate more funding for the good by donating towards the lottery prize rather than buying tickets directly.

Lotteries are approximately efficient public goods funding mechanisms and the level of funding approaches the optimal level as the prize grows. However, in the limit of large populations, contributions from the lottery mechanism converge to that of voluntary contributions and should fall to zero.

The role of non-profits
Public goods provision is in most cases part of governmental activities. In the introductory section of his book, Public Good Theories of the Nonprofit Sector, Bruce R. Kingma stated that; "In the Weisbrod model nonprofit organizations satisfy a demand for public goods, which is left unfilled by government provision. The government satisfies the demand of the median voters and therefore provides a level of the public good less than some citizens'-with a level of demand greater than the median voter's-desire. This unfilled demand for the public good is satisfied by nonprofit organizations. These nonprofit organizations are financed by the donations of citizens who want to increase the output of the public good."

Terminology, and types of goods
Non-rivalrous: accessible by all while one's usage of the product does not affect the availability for subsequent use.

Non-excludability: that is, it is impossible to exclude any individuals from consuming the good. Pay walls and memberships are common ways to create excludability.

Pure public: when a good exhibits the two traits, non-rivalry and non-excludability, it is referred to as the pure public good. Pure public goods are rare.

Impure public goods: the goods that satisfy the two public good conditions (non-rivalry and non-excludability) only to a certain extent or only some of the time. For instance, some aspects of cybersecurity, such as threat intelligence and vulnerability information sharing, collective response to cyber-attacks, the integrity of elections, and critical infrastructure protection, have the characteristics of impure public goods.

Private good: The opposite of a public good which does not possess these properties. A loaf of bread, for example, is a private good; its owner can exclude others from using it, and once it has been consumed, it cannot be used by others.

Common-pool resource: A good that is rivalrous but non-excludable. Such goods raise similar issues to public goods: the mirror to the public goods problem for this case is the 'tragedy of the commons', where the unfettered access to a good sometimes results in the overconsumption and thus depletion of that resource. For example, it is so difficult to enforce restrictions on deep-sea fishing that the world's fish stocks can be seen as a non-excludable resource, but one which is finite and diminishing.

Club goods: are the goods that are excludable but are non-rivalrous such as private parks.

Mixed good: final goods that are intrinsically private but that are produced by the individual consumer by means of private and public good inputs. The benefits enjoyed from such a good for any one individual may depend on the consumption of others, as in the cases of a crowded road or a congested national park.

Challenges in identifying public goods
The definition of non-excludability states that it is impossible to exclude individuals from consumption. Technology now allows radio or TV broadcasts to be encrypted such that persons without a special decoder are excluded from the broadcast. Many forms of information goods have characteristics of public goods. For example, a poem can be read by many people without reducing the consumption of that good by others; in this sense, it is non-rivalrous. Similarly, the information in most patents can be used by any party without reducing consumption of that good by others. Official statistics provide a clear example of information goods that are public goods, since they are created to be non-excludable. Creative works may be excludable in some circumstances, however: the individual who wrote the poem may decline to share it with others by not publishing it. Copyrights and patents both encourage the creation of such non-rival goods by providing temporary monopolies, or, in the terminology of public goods, providing a legal mechanism to enforce excludability for a limited period of time. For public goods, the "lost revenue" of the producer of the good is not part of the definition: a public good is a good whose consumption does not reduce any other's consumption of that good. Public goods also incorporate private goods, which makes it challenging to define what is private or public. For instance, you may think that the community soccer field is a public good. However, you need to bring your own cleats and ball to be able to play. There is also a rental fee that you would have to pay for you to be able to occupy that space. It is a mixed case of public and private goods.

Debate has been generated among economists whether such a category of "public goods" exists. Steven Shavell has suggested the following: "when professional economists talk about public goods they do not mean that there are a general category of goods that share the same economic characteristics, manifest the same dysfunctions, and that may thus benefit from pretty similar corrective solutions...there is merely an infinite series of particular problems (some of overproduction, some of underproduction, and so on), each with a particular solution that cannot be deduced from the theory, but that instead would depend on local empirical factors."

There is a common misconception that public goods are goods provided by the public sector. Although it is often the case that government is involved in producing public goods, this is not always true. Public goods may be naturally available, or they may be produced by private individuals, by firms, or by non-state groups, called collective action.

The theoretical concept of public goods does not distinguish geographic region in regards to how a good may be produced or consumed. However, some theorists, such as Inge Kaul, use the term "global public good" for a public good that is non-rivalrous and non-excludable throughout the whole world, as opposed to a public good that exists in just one national area. Knowledge has been argued as an example of a global public good, but also as a commons, the knowledge commons.

Graphically, non-rivalry means that if each of several individuals has a demand curve for a public good, then the individual demand curves are summed vertically to get the aggregate demand curve for the public good. This is in contrast to the procedure for deriving the aggregate demand for a private good, where individual demands are summed horizontally.

Some writers have used the term "public good" to refer only to non-excludable "pure public goods" and refer to excludable public goods as "club goods".

Digital public goods
Digital public goods include software, data sets, AI models, standards and content that are open source.

Use of the term “digital public good” appears as early as April, 2017 when Nicholas Gruen wrote Building the Public Goods of the Twenty-First Century, and has gained popularity with the growing recognition of the potential for new technologies to be implemented at scale to effectively serve people. Digital technologies have also been identified by countries, NGOs and private sector entities as a means to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

A digital public good is defined by the UN Secretary-General's Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, as: “open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the SDGs.”

Common examples of public goods include

 * public fireworks
 * clean air and other environmental goods
 * information goods, such as official statistics
 * Free and open-source software
 * authorship
 * public television
 * radio
 * invention
 * herd immunity
 * Wikipedia
 * National defense
 * Fire service
 * Flood defense
 * Street lights

Shedding light on some misclassified public goods

 * Some goods, like orphan drugs, require special governmental incentives to be produced, but cannot be classified as public goods since they do not fulfill the above requirements (non-excludable and non-rivalrous.)
 * Law enforcement, streets, libraries, museums, and education are commonly misclassified as public goods, but they are technically classified in economic terms as quasi-public goods because excludability is possible, but they do still fit some of the characteristics of public goods.
 * The provision of a lighthouse is a standard example of a public good, since it is difficult to exclude ships from using its services. No ship's use detracts from that of others, but since most of the benefit of a lighthouse accrues to ships using particular ports, lighthouse maintenance can be profitably bundled with port fees (Ronald Coase, The Lighthouse in Economics 1974). This has been sufficient to fund actual lighthouses.
 * Technological progress can create new public goods. The most simple examples are street lights, which are relatively recent inventions (by historical standards). One person's enjoyment of them does not detract from other persons' enjoyment, and it currently would be prohibitively expensive to charge individuals separately for the amount of light they presumably use.
 * Official statistics are another example. The government's ability to collect, process and provide high-quality information to guide decision-making at all levels has been strongly advanced by technological progress. On the other hand, a public good's status may change over time. Technological progress can significantly impact excludability of traditional public goods: encryption allows broadcasters to sell individual access to their programming. The costs for electronic road pricing have fallen dramatically, paving the way for detailed billing based on actual use.

Public goods are not restricted to human beings. It is one aspect of the study of cooperation in biology.

Free rider problem
The free rider problem is a primary issue in collective decision-making. An example is that some firms in a particular industry will choose not to participate in a lobby whose purpose is to affect government policies that could benefit the industry, under the assumption that there are enough participants to result in a favourable outcome without them. The free rider problem is also a form of market failure, in which market-like behavior of individual gain-seeking does not produce economically efficient results. The production of public goods results in positive externalities which are not remunerated. If private organizations do not reap all the benefits of a public good which they have produced, their incentives to produce it voluntarily might be insufficient. Consumers can take advantage of public goods without contributing sufficiently to their creation. This is called the free rider problem, or occasionally, the "easy rider problem". If too many consumers decide to "free-ride", private costs exceed private benefits and the incentive to provide the good or service through the market disappears. The market thus fails to provide a good or service for which there is a need.

The free rider problem depends on a conception of the human being as Homo economicus: purely rational and also purely selfish—extremely individualistic, considering only those benefits and costs that directly affect him or her. Public goods give such a person an incentive to be a free rider.

For example, consider national defence, a standard example of a pure public good. Suppose Homo economicus thinks about exerting some extra effort to defend the nation. The benefits to the individual of this effort would be very low, since the benefits would be distributed among all of the millions of other people in the country. There is also a very high possibility that he or she could get injured or killed during the course of his or her military service. On the other hand, the free rider knows that he or she cannot be excluded from the benefits of national defense, regardless of whether he or she contributes to it. There is also no way that these benefits can be split up and distributed as individual parcels to people. The free rider would not voluntarily exert any extra effort, unless there is some inherent pleasure or material reward for doing so (for example, money paid by the government, as with an all-volunteer army or mercenaries).

The free-riding problem is even more complicated than it was thought to be until recently. Any time non-excludability results in failure to pay the true marginal value (often called the "demand revelation problem"), it will also result in failure to generate proper income levels, since households will not give up valuable leisure if they cannot individually increment a good. This implies that, for public goods without strong special interest support, under-provision is likely since cost–benefit analysis is being conducted at the wrong income levels, and all of the un-generated income would have been spent on the public good, apart from general equilibrium considerations.

In the case of information goods, an inventor of a new product may benefit all of society, but hardly anyone is willing to pay for the invention if they can benefit from it for free. In the case of an information good, however, because of its characteristics of non-excludability and also because of almost zero reproduction costs, commoditization is difficult and not always efficient even from a neoclassical economic point of view.

Efficient production levels of public goods
The socially optimal provision of a public good in a society occurs when the sum of the marginal valuations of the public good (taken across all individuals) is equal to the marginal cost of providing that public good. These marginal valuations are, formally, marginal rates of substitution relative to some reference private good, and the marginal cost is a marginal rate of transformation that describes how much of that private good it costs to produce an incremental unit of the public good. This contrasts to the social optimality condition of private goods, which equates each consumer's valuation of the private good to its marginal cost of production.

For an example, consider a community of just two consumers and the government is considering whether or not to build a public park. One person is prepared to pay up to $200 for its use, while the other is willing to pay up to $100. The total value to the two individuals of having the park is $300. If it can be produced for $225, there is a $75 surplus to maintaining the park, since it provides services that the community values at $300 at a cost of only $225.

The classical theory of public goods defines efficiency under idealized conditions of complete information, a situation already acknowledged in Wicksell (1896). Samuelson emphasized that this poses problems for the efficient provision of public goods in practice and the assessment of an efficient Lindahl tax to finance public goods, because individuals have incentives to underreport how much they value public goods. Subsequent work, especially in mechanism design and the theory of public finance developed how valuations and costs could actually be elicited in practical conditions of incomplete information, using devices such as the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves mechanism. Thus, deeper analysis of problems of public goods motivated much work that is at the heart of modern economic theory.

Local public goods
The basic theory of public goods as discussed above begins with situations where the level of a public good (e.g., quality of the air) is equally experienced by everyone. However, in many important situations of interest, the incidence of benefits and costs is not so simple. For example, when people keep an office clean or monitor a neighborhood for signs of trouble, the benefits of that effort accrue to some people (those in their neighborhoods) more than to others. The overlapping structure of these neighborhoods is often modeled as a network. (When neighborhoods are totally separate, i.e., non-overlapping, the standard model is the Tiebout model.)

An example of locally public good that could help everyone, even ones not from the neighborhood, is a bus. Let's say you are a college student who is visiting their friend who goes to school in another city. You get to benefit from this services just like everyone that resides and goes to school in said city. There is also a correlation of benefit and cost that you are now a part of. You are benefiting by not having to walk to your destination and taking a bus instead. However, others might prefer to walk so they do not become a part of the problem, which is pollution due to gas given out by auto mobiles.

Recently, economists have developed the theory of local public goods with overlapping neighborhoods, or public goods in networks: both their efficient provision, and how much can be provided voluntarily in a non-cooperative equilibrium. When it comes to socially efficient provision, networks that are more dense or close-knit in terms of how much people can benefit each other have more scope for improving on an inefficient status quo. On the other hand, voluntary provision is typically below the efficient level, and equilibrium outcomes tend to involve strong specialization, with a few individuals contributing heavily and their neighbors free-riding on those contributions.

Ownership
Economic theorists such as Oliver Hart (1995) have emphasized that ownership matters for investment incentives when contracts are incomplete. The incomplete contracting paradigm has been applied to public goods by Besley and Ghatak (2001). They consider the government and a non-governmental organization (NGO) who can both make investments to provide a public good. Besley and Ghatak argue that the party who has a larger valuation of the public good should be the owner, regardless of whether the government or the NGO has a better investment technology. This result contrasts with the case of private goods studied by Hart (1995), where the party with the better investment technology should be the owner. However, it has been shown that the investment technology may matter also in the public-good case when a party is indispensable or when there are bargaining frictions between the government and the NGO. Halonen-Akatwijuka and Pafilis (2020) have demonstrated that Besley and Ghatak's results are not robust when there is a long-term relationship, such that the parties interact repeatedly. Moreover, Schmitz (2021) has shown that when the parties have private information about their valuations of the public good, then the investment technology can be an important determinant of the optimal ownership structure.

title: Public good (economics)