Talk:Excludability

Early comments

How is national defense different from national health care when it comes to being excludable? Same for national education. USchick (talk) 23:58, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Think of it in terms of a village: if the barbarians arrive to rape and pillage, it's kind of difficult to only protect certain houses. You want to build a wall around the whole village. And since everyone will be affected if there is a breach in the wall, rather than just the people who paid for its construction, it might make sense for everyone to participate in payment for it. With health care (except for, say, epidemics where it might be worth covering everyone to stop the spread of something nasty) it's pretty easy to exclude people: they don't get to see the doctor. That's excludability - whether it's right or not in that case is a debate for somewhere else, I think. Davidnwelton (talk) 15:25, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Lead is not at a high standard

The current lead is wordy and not especially encyclopedic in tone.

For my own notes, I refactored it as follows:

Excludability is the degree to which a good, service or resource ("goods") can be limited to only paying customers. Excludability was originally proposed in 1954 by American economist Paul Samuelson. Samuelson formalized the concept now known as public goods: goods that are both non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Samuelson additionally highlighted the market failure of the free-rider problem that can occur with non-excludable goods.

Subsequent to Samuelson's insight, goods are broadly assigned two fundamental characteristics:

• degree of excludability
• degree of rivalry

Richard Musgrave incorporated rivalry and excludability as criteria for defining consumption goods in 1959 and 1969. Garrett Hardin in 1968 expanded upon another key market inefficiency of non-excludeable goods: the tragedy of the commons.

Excludability is not an inherent characteristic of a good. Excludability was expanded upon by Elinor Ostrom in 1990 to be a continuous characteristic. Samuelson's work had presented excludability as either being present or absent. Ostrom's theory proposed that excludability can be placed on a scale to either full extreme. Adopting a continuous scale allows market participants to improve price models.

There's a good citation for the Richard Musgrave assertion in the rivalry article. I wasn't aiming for Wikipedia standards here, but I think it's largely better than what we now have. — MaxEnt 21:33, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Actually, I noticed "degree of excludability" in the bullet list, and suspect this was also downstream from Ostrom, so my proposal was not totally correct, either. — MaxEnt 21:37, 27 September 2023 (UTC)