What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past AQA A-Level papers and filtered to market failure. You answer, you find out immediately whether you were right, and you get the reasoning for the correct option and for each distractor. Wrong answers go to a mistakes locker so you can come back to exactly those.
Practice is free. You need an account only so your progress and your mistakes are still there next time.
Start practising Paper 3 MCQs →
What examiners see students get wrong here
These are the errors that cost marks on market failure, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Confusing negative externalities of production (MSC > MPC, shift the cost curve) with consumption (MSB < MPB, shift the benefit curve). Ask: who is causing the third-party effect?
- Shading the welfare loss triangle in the wrong place, or omitting it.
- Saying public goods are goods provided by the government, the definition is non-excludable and non-rival.
- Confusing merit goods with positive externalities. Merit goods are about information failure and the individual's own benefit.
- Treating inequality as an efficiency failure rather than an equity issue.
- Forgetting that the free-rider problem causes complete market failure.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Market Failure revision notes.