Market failure

thumb|right|While factories and refineries provide jobs and wages, they are also an example of a market failure, as they impose [[negative externalities on the surrounding region via their airborne pollutants.]]

In neoclassical economics, market failure is a situation in which the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not Pareto efficient, often leading to a net loss of economic value. The first known use of the term by economists was in 1958, but the concept has been traced back to the Victorian writers John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick.

Market failures are often associated with public goods, time-inconsistent preferences, information asymmetries, failures of competition, principal–agent problems, externalities, unequal bargaining power, behavioral irrationality (in behavioral economics), and macro-economic failures (such as unemployment and inflation).

The neoclassical school attributes market failures to the interference of self-regulatory organizations, governments or supra-national institutions in a particular market, although this view is criticized by heterodox economists. Economists, especially microeconomists, are often concerned with the causes of market failure and possible means of correction. Such analysis plays an important role in many types of public policy decisions and studies.

However, government policy interventions, such as taxes, subsidies, wage and price controls, and regulations, may also lead to an inefficient allocation of resources, sometimes called government failure. Most mainstream economists believe that there are circumstances (like building codes, fire safety regulations or endangered species laws) in which it is possible for government or other organizations to improve the inefficient market outcome. Several heterodox schools of thought disagree with this as a matter of ideology.

An ecological market failure exists when human activity in a market economy is exhausting critical non-renewable resources, disrupting fragile ecosystems, or overloading biospheric waste absorption capacities. In none of these cases does the criterion of Pareto efficiency obtain. These include if the market is "monopolised" or a small group of businesses hold significant market power resulting in a "failure of competition"; if production of the good or service results in an externality (external costs or benefits); if the good or service is a "public good"; if there is a "failure of information" or information asymmetry; if there is unequal bargaining power; if there is bounded rationality or irrationality; and if there are macro-economic failures such as unemployment or inflation.

Failure of competition

Agents in a market can gain market power, allowing them to block other mutually beneficial gains from trade from occurring. This can lead to inefficiency due to imperfect competition, which can take many different forms, such as monopolies, monopsonies, or monopolistic competition, if the agent does not implement perfect price discrimination.

thumb|270px|In small countries like [[New Zealand, electricity transmission is a natural monopoly. Due to enormous fixed costs and small market size, one seller can serve the entire market at the downward-sloping section of its average cost curve, meaning that it will have lower average costs than any potential entrant.]]

It is then a further question about what circumstances allow a monopoly to arise. In some cases, monopolies can maintain themselves where there are "barriers to entry" that prevent other companies from effectively entering and competing in an industry or market. Or there could exist significant first-mover advantages in the market that make it difficult for other firms to compete. Moreover, monopoly can be a result of geographical conditions created by huge distances or isolated locations. This leads to a situation where there are only few communities scattered across a vast territory with only one supplier. Australia is an example that meets this description. A natural monopoly is a firm whose per-unit cost decreases as it increases output; in this situation it is most efficient (from a cost perspective) to have only a single producer of a good. Natural monopolies display so-called increasing returns to scale. It means that at all possible outputs marginal cost needs to be below average cost if average cost is declining. One of the reasons is the existence of fixed costs, which must be paid without considering the amount of output, what results in a state where costs are evenly divided over more units leading to the reduction of cost per unit.

Public goods

Some markets can fail due to the nature of the goods being exchanged. For instance, some goods can display the attributes of public goods wherein sellers are unable to exclude non-buyers from using a product, as in the development of inventions that may spread freely once revealed, such as developing a new method of harvesting. This can cause underinvestment because developers cannot capture enough of the benefits from success to make the development effort worthwhile. This can also lead to resource depletion in the case of common-pool resources, whereby the use of the resource is rival but non-excludable, there is no incentive for users to conserve the resource. An example of this is a lake with a natural supply of fish: if people catch the fish faster than the fish can reproduce, then the fish population will dwindle until there are no fish left for future generations.

Externalities

A good or service could also have significant externalities,). Externalities can be positive or negative depending on how a good/service is produced or what the good/service provides to the public. Positive externalities tend to be goods like vaccines, schools, or advancement of technology. They usually provide the public with a positive gain. Negative externalities would be like noise or air pollution. Coase shows this with his example of the case Sturges v. Bridgman involving a confectioner and doctor. The confectioner had lived there many years and soon the doctor several years into residency decides to build a consulting room; it is right by the confectioner's kitchen which releases vibrations from his grinding of pestle and mortar ( ). The doctor wins the case by a claim of nuisance so the confectioner would have to cease from using his machine. Coase argues there could have been bargains instead the confectioner could have paid the doctor to continue the source of income from using the machine hopefully it is more than what the Doctor is losing ( ). Vice versa the doctor could have paid the confectioner to cease production since he is prohibiting a source of income from the confectioner. Coase used a few more examples similar in scope dealing with social cost of an externality and the possible resolutions.

thumb|Congested [[Times Square in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, which leads the world in urban automobile traffic congestion, but which has implemented congestion pricing in January 2025 to address the problem]]

Traffic congestion is an example of market failure that incorporates both non-excludability and externality. Public roads are common resources that are available for the entire population's use (non-excludable), and act as a complement to cars (the more roads there are, the more useful cars become). Because there is very low cost but high benefit to individual drivers in using the roads, the roads become congested, decreasing their usefulness to society. Furthermore, driving can impose hidden costs on society through pollution (externality). Solutions for this include public transportation, congestion pricing, tolls, and other ways of making the driver include the social cost in the decision to drive. The Coase theorem points out when one would expect the market to function properly even when there are externalities.

<blockquote>A market is an institution in which individuals or firms exchange not just commodities, but the rights to use them in particular ways for particular amounts of time. [...] Markets are institutions which organize the exchange of control of commodities, where the nature of the control is defined by the property rights attached to the commodities. Nonetheless, views still differ on whether something displaying these attributes is meaningful without the information provided by the market price system.

Information failures

Information asymmetry is considered a leading type of market failure. and moral hazard. Most commonly, information asymmetries are studied in the context of principal–agent problems. George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph E. Stiglitz developed the idea and shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Unequal bargaining power

In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith explored how an employer had the ability to "hold out" longer in a dispute over pay with workers because workers were more likely to go hungry more quickly, given that the employer has more property, and have fewer obstacles in organising. Unequal bargaining power has been used as a concept justifying economic regulation, particularly for employment, consumer, and tenancy rights since the early 20th century. Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century explains how unequal bargaining power undermines "conditions of "pure and perfect" competition" and leads to a persistently lower share of income for labor, and leads to growing inequality. While it was argued by Ronald Coase that bargaining power merely affects distribution of income, but not productive efficiency, the modern behavioural evidence establishes that distribution or fairness of exchange does affect motivation to work, and therefore unequal bargaining power is a market failure. Notably, the price of labour was excluded from the scope of the original charts on supply and demand by their inventor, Fleeming Jenkin, who considered that the wages of labour could not be equated with ordinary markets for commodities such as corn, because of labour's unequal bargaining power.

Bounded rationality

In Models of Man, Herbert A. Simon points out that most people are only partly rational, and are emotional/irrational in the remaining part of their actions. In another work, he states "boundedly rational agents experience limits in formulating and solving complex problems and in processing (receiving, storing, retrieving, transmitting) information" (Williamson, p. 553, citing Simon). Simon describes a number of dimensions along which "classical" models of rationality can be made somewhat more realistic, while sticking within the vein of fairly rigorous formalization. These include:

limiting what sorts of utility functions there might be.
recognizing the costs of gathering and processing information.
the possibility of having a "vector" or "multi-valued" utility function.

Simon suggests that economic agents employ the use of heuristics to make decisions rather than a strict rigid rule of optimization. They do this because of the complexity of the situation, and their inability to process and compute the expected utility of every alternative action. Deliberation costs might be high and there are often other, concurrent economic activities also requiring decisions.

The concept of bounded rationality was significantly expanded through behavioral economics research, suggesting that people are systematically irrational in day-to-day decisions. Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow explored how human beings operate as if they have two systems of thinking: a fast "system 1" mode of thought for snap, everyday decisions which applies rules of thumb but is frequently mistaken; and a slow "system 2" mode of thought that is careful and deliberative, but not as often used in making ordinary decisions to buy and sell or do business.

Macro-economic failures

"Unemployment, inflation and "disequilibrium" are considered a category of market failure at a "macro economic" or "whole economy" level. These symptoms (of high job loss, or fast rising prices or both) can result from a financial crash, a recession or depression, and the market failure is evident in the sustained underproduction of an economy, or a tendency not to recover immediately. Macroeconomic business cycles are a part of the market. They are characterized by constant downswings and upswings which influence economic activity. Therefore, this situation requires some kind of government intervention. which can be in the "public interest", as well as in interests of stakeholders with equity. Inefficiency only arises when means are chosen by individuals that are inconsistent with their desired goals. This definition of efficiency differs from that of Pareto efficiency, and forms the basis of the theoretical argument against the existence of market failures. However, providing that the conditions of the first welfare theorem are met, these two definitions agree, and give identical results. Austrians argue that the market tends to eliminate its inefficiencies through the process of entrepreneurship driven by the profit motive; something the government has great difficulty detecting, or correcting.

Marxian

Objections also exist on more fundamental bases, such as Marxian analysis. Colloquial uses of the term "market failure" reflect the notion of a market "failing" to provide some desired attribute different from efficiency – for instance, high levels of inequality can be considered a "market failure", yet are not Pareto inefficient, and so would not be considered a market failure by mainstream

economics. Quite the opposite: The unrestricted market has been exacerbating this global state of ecological dis-equilibrium, and is expected to continue doing so well into the foreseeable future.

References

External links

Market Failures – in Price Theory, an intermediate text by David D. Friedman