NEAR-PUBLIC GOOD: A good that's easy to keep nonpayers from consuming, but use of the good by one person doesn't prevent use by others. The trick with a near-public good is that it's easy to keep people away, and thus you can charge them a price for consuming, but there's no real good reason to do so. From an efficiency view, the more people who consume a near-public good, the better off society. This mixture of nearly unlimited benefits and the ability to charge a price means that some near-public goods are sold through markets and others are provided by government. For efficiency's sake, none should be sold through markets.

     See also | excludability | rival consumption | good types | common-property good | public good | private good | efficiency | user charge |

NEAR-PUBLIC GOOD, AmosWEB GLOSS*arama, http://www.AmosWEB.com, AmosWEB LLC, 2000-2025. [Accessed: July 1, 2025].

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Inefficiencies in the allocation of resources attributable to imperfections in the operation of governments. Government failures are based on the utility-maximizing behavior of politicians, voters, nonvoters, special interest groups, and government employees. The identification and analysis of government failures is central to the study of public choice and offers something of a counterbalance to government actions designed to address the inefficiencies of market failures.

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