Public goods essays

Thanks for the ideas for essays on public goods. I settled on giving the students a choice of one from three…

(1) “To what extent is the emerging “e-conomy”, consisting of companies such as Google and Facebook who rely on advertising revenue, different to traditional markets?”

(2) “Open source software turns a private good into a public one and is therefore inefficient.” Discuss.

(3) Compare and contrast the characteristics of public goods and private goods - should the internet be made available to all free of charge and funded by the government?

In an exercise this afternoon I asked students (independently) to write down how much they would be willing to pay for a monthly subscription to
(a) Google
(b) Facebook
(c) You Tube

The replies were interesting. On the whole the willingness to pay for Google far outweighed Facebook and there were more than a few moans about diminishing returns to using Facebook - there seems to be a marked antipathy to the waves of new applications that are being developed for the Facebook platform. Indeed searching for an application that has any meaning or value is rather like watching a troop of performing elephants who are all suffering from Diarrhea - you have to watch a load of crap before you find / see something special. The smarter guys in the room held fire on their valuations for Facebook saying that they wanted to see how many of their mates were prepared to pay.