PDF(Pubmed)
Abstract：
Traditional analysis takes the public or private nature of goods as given. However, technological advances, particularly related to digital goods such as non-fungible tokens, increasingly make rivalry a choice variable of the designer. This paper addresses the question of when a profit-maximizing seller prefers to provide an asset as a private good or as a public good. While the public good is subject to a free-rider problem, a profit-maximizing seller or designer faces a nontrivial quantity-exclusivity tradeoff, and so profits from collecting small payments from multiple agents can exceed the large payment from a single agent. We provide conditions under which the profit from the public good exceeds that from a private good. If the cost of production is sufficiently, but not excessively, large, then production is profitable only for the public good. Moreover, if the lower bound of the support of the buyers\' value distribution is positive, then the profit from the public good is unbounded in the number of buyers, whereas the profit from selling the private good is never more than the upper bound of the support minus the cost. As the variance of the agents\' distribution becomes smaller, public goods eventually outperform private goods, reflecting intuition based on complete information models, in which public goods always outperform private goods in terms of revenue.
摘要：
传统分析认为商品的公共或私人性质是给定的。然而,技术进步,特别是与数字商品有关，例如不可替代的代币，越来越多地使竞争成为设计师的选择变量。本文讨论了利润最大化的卖方何时更愿意将资产作为私人物品或公共物品提供的问题。虽然公共利益受到搭便车问题的影响，利润最大化的卖家或设计师面临着不平凡的数量-排他性权衡，因此，从多个代理商收取小额付款的利润可以超过单个代理商的大额付款。我们提供条件，在这些条件下，来自公共物品的利润超过来自私人物品的利润。如果生产成本足够，但也不过分,大,那么生产只对公共利益是有利可图的。此外，如果买方价值分配的支持下限为正，那么从公共物品中获得的利润在购买者的数量上是无限的，而出售私人物品的利润永远不会超过支持减去成本的上限。随着代理人分布的方差变小，公共物品最终胜过私人物品，基于完整的信息模型反映直觉，在这种情况下，公共物品在收入方面总是优于私人物品。
