Market Failure - Congested class benches

Scenario: Every morning when you go to school, the class benches are all filled. So if you are those who reach school not too early but not too late, you'll have to stand around and look at people sitting on class benches, because there is no more space for you to sit! ><

Firstly, supply of class benches is vertical. This is because class benches are one-of-a-kind - there is only one of this kind of benches where your friendly classmates will gather around and do homework, not any other benches.

Secondly, there is shortage of class benches because each class has 26 students and a class bench can only sit about 8 students. Thus, quantity supplied is far lesser than quantity demanded, assuming that everyone wants to sit at class benches. There are no close substitutes for class benches as there is only 1 such bench in school that is allocated to each class.

Also, demand for class benches is highly affected by times of the day. In the morning, ~7.00am, demand for class benches is high because people start streaming to school. Once flag raising is over, ~7.55am, demand for class benches decreases to almost 0 because most students have lessons, and would not linger around the class bench (unless they want to get demerit points)

By right, class benches are pure public goods because it has the characteristics of non-excludability and non-rivalry. This is the ideal case. However, because people from other classes might shoo you off when you sit on their class benches whenever demand is high, class benches should only be considered as a public good. As such, additional class benches will not be provided by the market/school management.

The provision of public goods like class benches suffers from the "free rider" problem. Since it is impossible to exclude those who do not pay from using class benches, no one has the incentive to pay what the class benches is really worth to them. (And in some cases, students may even not have the incentive to protect class benches, and will vandalise them) And since the students can have all the benefits from class benches (sitting down to chat and discuss homework) without paying for it, there is a absence of price signal and no one will supply class benches. Hence, despite the fact that class benches have valuable benefits to students, where students can put there bags and have a table and chair to do work, the market will not provide class benches =(

Sometimes, there is a negative externality because other students will have difficulty walking through and may waste more time just trying to walk across the congested class bench area.In order to solve this problem, especially to encourage students to protect class benches, our discipline master has warned that any heavily vandalised class bench will be removed and that class would have no class bench. This acts as a negative incentive to discourage students from vandalising class benches. However, supply of class benches has still not increased over a long period of time. This is also partly due to space contraints - there is a lack of land.

In conclusion, class benches are congested but nothing much can be done because 1. not enough space to put more benches 2. no one has the incentive to buy more benches because it is a public good. Also, even though class benches have no close substitutes, in real life, not everyone wants to sit on the class bench. Some may choose to go to the canteen to eat breakfast while doing homework. However, this only alleviates congestion slightly and class benches can still be considered congested.

-Leona