Value, Externalities, and the Boundaries of the Market.

Pecuniary Externalities In the first section following, I argue that certain kinds of pecuniary externalities are conceptually indistinguishable from technological externalities; hence the class of pecuniary externalities need not expand endlessly to implicate all market transactions any more than the class of technological externalities does. In the second section following, I argue that such pecuniary externalities, like technological externalities, can sometime impose costs that exceed their benefits and so are inefficient; hence pecuniary externalities do not necessarily vanish into non-existence even under perfect competition. But the class of pecuniary externalities that resemble technological externalities is in fact even smaller than that, since not all of a price rise causes a pecuniary externality in the first place. In contrast, in the case of an existence-value externality, such as when a timber company's clear-cutting of a forest imposes an existence-value externality on an environmentalist, it is the company's consumption of the trees in and of itself that creates the externality. [Extracted from the article]