Exam 11: Public Goods and Common Resources

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has determined that the probability of a worker dying from exposure to a hazardous chemical used in the production of fertilizer is 0.008. The cost of imposing a regulation that would ban the chemical is $32 million. If the value of a human life is equal to $10 million, how many people must the policy affect in order for the benefits to exceed the costs?

Table 11-6 Consider the city of Widgetapolis with only four residents, John, James, Mary, and Lydia. The four residents are trying to determine how many hours to spend in cleaning up the public lake. The table below shows each resident's willingness to pay for each hour of cleaning. ​ ​ -Refer to Table 11-6. Suppose the cost to clean the lake is $40 per hour and that the residents have agreed to split the cost of cleaning the lake equally. To maximize his own surplus, how many hours of cleaning would John like to have completed?

When property rights are not well established,

Goods that are not excludable include both

Which of the following statements is not correct?

Consider a good for which the number of people who benefit from the good is large and the exclusion of any one those people is impossible. In this case, the market for this good will likely

Figure 11-1 -Refer to Figure 11-1. With which of the boxes - A, B, C, or D - do we associate the Tragedy of the Commons?

Three business people meet for lunch at an Indian restaurant. They decide that each person will order an item off the menu, and they will share all dishes. They will split the cost of the final bill evenly among each of the people at the table. When the food is delivered to the table, each person faces incentives similar to the

Table 11-5 A small island off the coast of Cape Cod contains two restaurants and two retail stores. Tourists need to take a ferry boat to reach the island, but with a recent slowdown in the economy, tourists are less willing to pay for the boat ride to visit the island. The owners of the restaurants and stores on the island - Restaurants 1 and 2, and Stores A and B - think that if tourists could ride the ferry for free, they would be happy to visit the island, eat and shop. The business owners are considering contributing to a pool of money that will be used to pay for roundtrip ferry service each day. The table represents their willingness to pay, that is, the maximum amount that each business owner is willing to contribute, per day, to pay for each ferry trip. -Refer to Table 11-5. Suppose the cost to run the ferry for each roundtrip is $750. Then total surplus for the 4 business owners is

Advocates of antipoverty programs claim that fighting poverty is a public good.

Suppose that everyone prefers to live in a society without poverty. Further suppose that some private charities are successful in reducing poverty. People who do not contribute to the charities

The Tragedy of the Commons will be evident when a growing number of sheep grazing on the town commons leads to a destruction of the grazing resource. To correct for this problem, the town could

On holiday weekends thousands of people picnic in state parks. Some picnic areas become so overcrowded the benefit or value of picnicking diminishes to zero. Suppose that the Minnesota State Park Service institutes a variable fee structure. On weekdays when the picnic areas get little use, the fee is zero. On normal weekends, the fee is $8 per person. On holiday weekends, the fee is $14 per person. The fee system corrects a problem known as the

Table 11-6 Consider the city of Widgetapolis with only four residents, John, James, Mary, and Lydia. The four residents are trying to determine how many hours to spend in cleaning up the public lake. The table below shows each resident's willingness to pay for each hour of cleaning. ​ ​ -Refer to Table 11-6. Suppose the cost to clean the lake is $40 per hour and that the residents have agreed to split the cost of cleaning the lake equally. If it was decided that the lake will be cleaned for the number of hours that maximizes total surplus of Widgetapolis, how much individual surplus will John receive in total?

Table 11-3 This table describes the police protection demands for three equal sized groups of people in Safetyville. The second, third, and fourth columns show the number of person-hours of police protection per day that a group will demand for a given price (the first column). -Refer to Table 11-3. What is the value of the 99^th unit of police protection in Safetyville?

A pizza is

Many species of animals are common resources, and many must be protected by law to keep them from extinction. Why is the cow not one of these endangered species even though there is such a high demand for beef?

A free rider problem arises when

Table 11-3 This table describes the police protection demands for three equal sized groups of people in Safetyville. The second, third, and fourth columns show the number of person-hours of police protection per day that a group will demand for a given price (the first column). -Refer to Table 11-3. If the marginal cost of police protection is constant at $36 per person-hour, what is the efficient level of police protection to provide?

Table 11-5 A small island off the coast of Cape Cod contains two restaurants and two retail stores. Tourists need to take a ferry boat to reach the island, but with a recent slowdown in the economy, tourists are less willing to pay for the boat ride to visit the island. The owners of the restaurants and stores on the island - Restaurants 1 and 2, and Stores A and B - think that if tourists could ride the ferry for free, they would be happy to visit the island, eat and shop. The business owners are considering contributing to a pool of money that will be used to pay for roundtrip ferry service each day. The table represents their willingness to pay, that is, the maximum amount that each business owner is willing to contribute, per day, to pay for each ferry trip. -Refer to Table 11-5. Suppose the cost to run the ferry for each roundtrip is $750. How many ferry trips should there be to maximize the total surplus of the four business owners?