Collective consumption

Collective consumption refers to goods and services that are produced and consumed on a public, shared, or collective level. The concept provides an alternative to viewing consumption as a purely individual or private activity. Examples of collective consumption include public transportation, public housing, libraries, schools, health care, waste disposal, parks, and police and fire protection.

The term is closely related to the economic concept of public goods — non-rivalrous goods or services that are essential to consumers but which the private market is unlikely to supply, thus requiring government provision. The collective consumption is not limited to public goods, though: quite a few goods consumed collectively are rivalrous, like a hospital bed, a school desk, an apartment in a public housing complex (this subclass of private goods that are nonetheless consumed collectively is sometimes called merit goods). Some services, like national defense, could not be sensibly provided by the market, while others, like education or housing, could be and often are. The degree to which a society's consumption is collective is sometimes used as a traditional index of its socialist policies, and the concept is also referred to as socialized consumption.