The Free Rider problem
Public goods provide a very important. The production of public goods results in positive externalities which are not remunerated. If private organizations don't reap all the benefits of a public good which they have produced, there will be insufficient incentives to produce it voluntarily. Consumers can take advantage of public goods without contributing sufficiently to their creation. This is called the free rider problem.
For example, consider a group assignment is given to four students by an faculty, and this assignment is very important as it hold 25% of overall weight age of total marks but still one of the group member did not participate in preparation of assignment but at the time of presentation all the member of group present their part including the member who did not participate in making of assignment and above all he delivered his part without seeing matter once before coming to class because of that group did not good grade. I am not sure what should be the probable solution for this problem. But this problem arises many times.
Another example is, consider a national defense, a standard example of a pure public good. A purely rational person is an individual who is extremely individualistic, considering only those benefits and costs that directly affect him or her. Public goods give such a person incentive to be a free rider.
Suppose this purely rational person thinks about exerting some extra effort to defend the nation. The benefits to the individual of this effort would be very low, since the benefits would be distributed among all of the millions of other people in the country. There is also a very high possibility that he or she could get injured or killed during the course of his or her military service.
On the other hand, the free rider knows that he or she cannot be excluded from the benefits regardless of whether he or she contributes to it. There is also no way that these benefits can be split up and distributed as individual parcels to people. The free rider would not voluntarily exert any extra effort, unless there is some inherent pleasure or material reward for doing so.
5 comments:
Any how we need to rule out the problem of free-riding.
From today's CAC class excerpts it is clear that it can be removed by doing internal grading system or Everybody's contribution should be explicitly mentioned in the assignment so that the faculty can easily come to know.
What do u think??
The problem of free rider can be extended to most government departments also. those of us who have been to the government offices know for a fact that almost alll the offices have employees who are not willing to work and are taking equal salary. thus they are a factor in ever increasing dissatisfaction among people. let us have a startegy in which people have a way of ranking services provided by the government officials and based on these feedback they shall get from people.
howz that?
Free rider problem can be solved at an intragroup level only if professors think out of the box in order to formulate rules which provides incentives fo individuals in a group in addition to group as a whole to perform well. The current problem is that professors do not have the visibility at what happens inside any group. We shoul think on how this can be achieved in addition to the evaluation of the final output.
Thanks
first of all, it is very important to understand what leads to a person to become a free rider. let me make it more clear, take an example of our class only where whenever quiz goes on.....people easily cheat from others answers sheet now...this is not because he only wants to cheat but the fact is others also want him to cheat and hence help him out....so rather criticising free-riders ,its very important to understand until and unless we do not change our attitude and behaviour we would never be able to solve this Fre-rider problem
The problem on free rider is difucult to rule out. In democracy world you need more collective action and due to this free rediers gets incentive from this
So it is group member's duty for active participation in Collective action and be a part of Community.
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