Talk:Rivalry (economics)

message: The paragraph beginning "Non-rivalrous goods are not scarce from the point of view of the individual, but are typically scarce from a social perspective" seems slightly off to me. In what may seem like a minor quibble, it seems to me that it is the resources for producing, maintaining or improving the good that are scarce, not the good itself.
To use the example of this Wikipedia, it could be be bigger or better given extra resources but is what currently exists scarce in the economics meaning of the term? In the scarcity article the following definition is given: "a good is scarce if people would consume more of it if it were free." By this definition the Wikipedia can never be scarce.
In the Free rider article, non- or under-production of a public good is mentioned as a common problem. Are these under-produced public goods then scarce or is there a different term for lack of goods whose production needs an allocation of scarce resources but once complete can be duplicated/enjoyed by all with ease?
Can the confusion be cleared up simply by emphasising that (non-)rivalrousness is a continuum and that beautiful views and good policing are scarcer in some localities than in others? Or is this just a gap in economics created by too tight a focus on rivalrous goods and scarcity?
 DavidScotson 19:55, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rivalrous equals Scarce? 

message: From the article: "Nonrival, tangible objects include a beautiful scenic view or the common cold."  First, I assume 'objects' in that sentence means 'goods'.  Probably it should just say 'goods'.  Second, is the common cold actually considered an 'object/good'?  I understand the point of the example, but perhaps there's something else that can be used in the example to serve the same purpose that is more obviously a good than 'common cold'.
Bjpremore 14:51, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have an issue with that sentence as well. Scenic views being considered non-rival. Space to see that certain view is limited and more often than not, you pay a premium for that view. I suppose you could say that the view itself is nonrival, but the space to view it is rivalrous. --Chicbicyclist 11:59, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  common cold is a good? 

message: How is national defense different from national health care when it comes to being excludable? Same for national education. USchick (talk) 23:59, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Need an expert 

message: A recent change added "intellectual property" as a rivalrous good; however, copyrights and patents are necessarily and inherently mechanisms to apply scarcity to non-rivalrous goods.  I will remove this change once; please comment with rationale if you disagree. chrylis (talk) 00:34, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree. It's not the IP that is non-scarce, but the reproduction that is. The IP itself is theoretically unique. The legal protections to IP are just the possible approximations adequate to the nature of this type of good. The rivalry of IP is evident when you consider that the more the market is saturated by sellers of a given IP, such as a book or a movie, the smaller is the potential profit for each seller. It's not unlike someone actually stealing a production of physical goods and selling entirely for their own profit. That's why laws protecting intellectual property were devised, effectively creating the viability of such market, visibly fostering intellectual and technological progress. We can always imagine that there could be some holistic effect in the end without a market, but so is the case with full-blown communism or mutualism of physical goods.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.46.155.91 (talk) 04:22, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intellectual property 

message: Following on recent advances in economic theory, the entry was updated and the number of supporting references has been quadrupled. The entry has not been revised beyond the first paragraph due to other commitments. Further work will be necessary to weed out unsupported claims and streamline the remaining. Thanks to everybody involved. Sslevine (talk) 22:04, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Updated Definition to Reflect Continuous Nature of Rivarly 

message: The article says:
In fact, certain types of intellectual property become more valuable as more people consume them (anti-rival). For example, the more people using a particular language, the more valuable that language becomes.
This is incorrect, since value is subjective. As it's written, this is an attempt to say that the objective value of a language is in its ease of use with as many people as possible, and that this is true for that entire type of intellectual property. An easy counterexample would be a code, where the value of it to its creators and users is that it isn't widely known. There are also people who don't hope that their non-code language spreads beyond their tribe or ethnic group.
Since value is subjective, there is no type of intellectual property that implies any objective values. —Olathe (talk) 13:32, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Value is subjective 

message: I have mostly been seeing "rival goods" and not "rivalrous goods". A quick search on Ngram  confirms my impression: in the year 2000 for instance, the expression "rival good" has been used six times more than "rivalrous good". A quick search in dictionaries seems to indicate that "rivalrous" would be more adequate however (for instance in Merriam Webster, "rivalrous" is defined as "given to rivalry"). Any ideas?
Rdavout (talk) 13:14, 11 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rival or rivalrous goods? 

message: "Other examples of non-rival goods include a beautiful scenic view, national defense, clean air, street lights, and public safety"
* A beautiful scenic view can be located entirely on private property and not accessible to anyone but the owner. Even if public, the infrastructure to drive/hike to that view can only fit a certain number of people.
* National defense is a finite resource which can be depleted. The pigeonhole principle implies that after a certain number of simultaneous fronts, there will no longer be troops available to defend another attack. (The last person to get attacked, who gets no army response, will certainly see it as a rival good, as the usage by others prevented the usage by him)
* Whether or not you have clean air depends on your geographic location, which is again limited by both private property and pigeonhole principle (given any bounded location with "clean air", only a certain number of people can fit in that area)
* Public safety is depletable like the military - if all city police units are already responding to other calls, you will not get a response. If all county rescue helicopters are already rescuing people, there is no rescue helicopter to save you.
Helpful-Concrete (talk) 19:54, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it's key to consider whether the standard, typical case for each example makes sense; not so much to see that the examples make sense in every detail. For instance, clean air as a non-rivalrous good is usually thought of in the local context of a park or a local neighborhood. However, if you have better (more bulletproof) examples, then maybe we can use those to improve the article. — HTGS (talk) 08:13, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Questionable examples of nonrivalrous