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To sell public or private goods
Traditional analysis takes the public or private nature of goods as given. However, technological advances, particularly related to digital goods such as non-fungible tokens, increasingly make rivalry a choice variable of the designer. This paper addresses the question of when a profit-maximizing se...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9362552/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10058-022-00305-7 |
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author | Loertscher, Simon Marx, Leslie M. |
author_facet | Loertscher, Simon Marx, Leslie M. |
author_sort | Loertscher, Simon |
collection | PubMed |
description | Traditional analysis takes the public or private nature of goods as given. However, technological advances, particularly related to digital goods such as non-fungible tokens, increasingly make rivalry a choice variable of the designer. This paper addresses the question of when a profit-maximizing seller prefers to provide an asset as a private good or as a public good. While the public good is subject to a free-rider problem, a profit-maximizing seller or designer faces a nontrivial quantity-exclusivity tradeoff, and so profits from collecting small payments from multiple agents can exceed the large payment from a single agent. We provide conditions under which the profit from the public good exceeds that from a private good. If the cost of production is sufficiently, but not excessively, large, then production is profitable only for the public good. Moreover, if the lower bound of the support of the buyers’ value distribution is positive, then the profit from the public good is unbounded in the number of buyers, whereas the profit from selling the private good is never more than the upper bound of the support minus the cost. As the variance of the agents’ distribution becomes smaller, public goods eventually outperform private goods, reflecting intuition based on complete information models, in which public goods always outperform private goods in terms of revenue. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9362552 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Springer Berlin Heidelberg |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-93625522022-08-10 To sell public or private goods Loertscher, Simon Marx, Leslie M. Rev Econ Design Original Paper Traditional analysis takes the public or private nature of goods as given. However, technological advances, particularly related to digital goods such as non-fungible tokens, increasingly make rivalry a choice variable of the designer. This paper addresses the question of when a profit-maximizing seller prefers to provide an asset as a private good or as a public good. While the public good is subject to a free-rider problem, a profit-maximizing seller or designer faces a nontrivial quantity-exclusivity tradeoff, and so profits from collecting small payments from multiple agents can exceed the large payment from a single agent. We provide conditions under which the profit from the public good exceeds that from a private good. If the cost of production is sufficiently, but not excessively, large, then production is profitable only for the public good. Moreover, if the lower bound of the support of the buyers’ value distribution is positive, then the profit from the public good is unbounded in the number of buyers, whereas the profit from selling the private good is never more than the upper bound of the support minus the cost. As the variance of the agents’ distribution becomes smaller, public goods eventually outperform private goods, reflecting intuition based on complete information models, in which public goods always outperform private goods in terms of revenue. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2022-08-04 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC9362552/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10058-022-00305-7 Text en © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law. This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. |
spellingShingle | Original Paper Loertscher, Simon Marx, Leslie M. To sell public or private goods |
title | To sell public or private goods |
title_full | To sell public or private goods |
title_fullStr | To sell public or private goods |
title_full_unstemmed | To sell public or private goods |
title_short | To sell public or private goods |
title_sort | to sell public or private goods |
topic | Original Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9362552/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10058-022-00305-7 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT loertschersimon tosellpublicorprivategoods AT marxlesliem tosellpublicorprivategoods |