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Wild fish stocks are a rivalrous good, as the amount of fish caught by one boat reduces the number of fish available to be caught by others. In economics, a good is said to be rivalrous or a rival if its consumption by one consumer prevents simultaneous consumption by other consumers, [1] or if consumption by one party reduces the ability of another party to consume it.
This page compares the properties of several typical utility functions of divisible goods. These functions are commonly used as examples in consumer theory . The functions are ordinal utility functions, which means that their properties are invariant under positive monotone transformation .
Excludability was originally proposed in 1954 by American economist Paul Samuelson where he formalised the concept now known as public goods, i.e. goods that are both non-rivalrous and non-excludable. [1] Samuelson additionally highlighted the market failure of the free-rider problem that can occur with non
Many forms of price discrimination are legal, but in some cases charging consumers different prices for the same goods is illegal. For example, in the United States, the Robinson–Patman Act makes price discrimination illegal in certain anti-competitive interstate sale of commodities.
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 monopolist will want to sell to the consumer with the lowest valuation. This is because production is costless and by charging a price just above zero it still makes a profit. Hence to separate the consumers, the monopoly will charge first consumer () where is the number of consumers. If the discount factor is high enough this price will be ...
It can be shown that consumer analysis with indifference curves (an ordinal approach) gives the same results as that based on cardinal utility theory — i.e., consumers will consume at the point where the marginal rate of substitution between any two goods equals the ratio of the prices of those goods (the equi-marginal principle).
The consumer has ranked all available alternative combinations of commodities in terms of the satisfaction they provide him. Assume that there are two consumption bundles A and B each containing two commodities x and y. A consumer can unambiguously determine that one and only one of the following is the case: