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Quasimarket failure

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Abstract

The efficiency of “quasimarkets”—decentralized public goods provision subjected to Tiebout competition—is a staple of public choice conventional wisdom. Yet in the 1990s a countermovement called “neoconsolidationism” began to challenge this wisdom. The neoconsolidationists use the logic of government failure to argue that quasimarkets fail and that jurisdictional consolidation is a superior way to supply public goods and services in metropolitan areas. Public choice scholars have largely ignored the neoconsolidationists’ challenge. This paper brings that challenge to public choice scholars’ attention with the hope of encouraging responses. It also offers some thoughts about the directions such responses might take.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, George Mason University, MS 3G4, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Peter J. Boettke, Christopher J. Coyne & Peter T. Leeson

Authors
  1. Peter J. Boettke
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  2. Christopher J. Coyne
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  3. Peter T. Leeson
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Correspondence to Peter T. Leeson.

Additional information

This paper was prepared for a conference on State and Local Public Choice at the DeVoe L. Moore Center at Florida State University, February 17–19, 2011. We thank the Editor and participants of that conference, especially Randall Holcombe, and Richard Wagner, for discussions about the early ideas that formed this paper.

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Boettke, P.J., Coyne, C.J. & Leeson, P.T. Quasimarket failure. Public Choice 149, 209 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-011-9833-8

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