Externalities, Public Goods and Natural Monopoly as Market Failures and Their Implications for the Consumer

The reality of daily life gives us sufficient examples of situations in which individual decisions within free market do not automatically and warranted lead to a global economic optimum. Such a situation is denominated as “market failure”, both understood as “the failure of a more or less idealized system of price-market institutions to sustain “desirable” activities or to stop “undesirable” activities” [1], but also as any performance of the market which is considered less better than the best performance possible [2]. Specialized economic literature generally distinguishes four categories of market failures, namely: externalities, public goods, natural monopoly and information asymmetries. The present paper will focused on the first three of these, both from the point of view of generating causes and the effects involved on the consumers, and from the point of view of the possible solutions for rectifying them