Moral Free Riding

subject-based repositories such as PubMed Central, following an embargo period of 12 months for scientific, technical or medical journals, 24 months for social sciences and humanities journals.Equality: 8 if anyone receives the good, everyone receives the same amount.Indivisibility: 9 there can be more than one consumer of the good, and each consumes the total output.Under many conditions, the provision of public goods will be subject to the following theoretical problem.The failure of a group to cooperate to produce a public good may be collectively, but not individually, suboptimal from the point of view of self-interest: that is, there can exist a failure to cooperate, without any individual's acting suboptimally from that point of view, even though each individual is selfinterested and is worse off without the good than he would be paying and getting it. 10 A first interest in free riding is the game-theoretic one of stating the conditions under which this "free rider problem" arises, and the terms in which it may be solved. 11tice, however, that the only kind of publicity required to produce this problem is jointness in supply -once the good is produced, it can be acquired without payingand not publicity in any of the other respects.In particular, the problem arises equally for rival goods, provided they are in joint supply, like limited stocks of fish in the sea.Given the game-theoretic interest, then, the best definition of a free rider is this: an individual who, in successfully optimizing his own interests, does not contribute to the production of a good which is in joint supply to a certain group, in conditions where it would be collectively self-interestedly suboptimal for the group not to cooperate towards its production.To what extent is the theoretical problem a practical one?This depends, clearly enough, on the extent to which the conditions identified by the theoretical investigation are actually realized, and the extent to which actual agents approximate optimally self-interested ones.Here lies the interest of mainstream economics in the free rider: in particular, it wants to know how to construct mechanisms for the production of public goods to which beneficiaries have an incentive to contribute. 12 Once we turn to tackling this practical problem, the other features of public goods (apart from jointness in supply) become important.In particular, the question whether the good is rival or not will have importance, given the effect on the motivation of