Shared Consumption: A Technological Analysis

Abstract

James Buchanan (Economica, 1966) has argued that Alfred Marshall's theory of jointly-supplied goods can be extended to analyze the allocation of impure public goods. This article introduces a way of modelling sharing technologies for jointly-supplied goods that captures the essential features of Buchanan's proposal. Public and private goods are special cases of shared goods obtained by appropriately specifying the sharing technology. Necessary conditions for an allocation in a shared goods economy to be Pareto optimal are identified and related to the optimality conditions for public and private goods.