Cash on the table: Why traditional theories of market failure fail

Robert H. Frank

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2016, vol. 126, issue PB, 130-136

Abstract: Many modern progressives attribute the market's failings to conspiracies by powerful corporate actors to exploit workers and consumers. In this paper I defend the claim that many of the same failures are instead often rooted in competition among individuals for relative advantage. In the familiar stadium metaphor, all stand to get a better view, only to discover that no one sees any better than if all had remained comfortably seated. Analogous discrepancies between individual and collective incentives help explain the presence of overtime laws, workplace safety regulations, and many other institutional features of the modern welfare state. These features would be useful even if all consumers were perfectly informed and rational and markets took the perfectly competitive ideal form described in textbooks.

Keywords: Consumption externalities; Consumption taxation; Context; Market failure; Relative income; Safety regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 E21 H21 H23 J28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268115002826
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:126:y:2016:i:pb:p:130-136

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2015.10.015

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().