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Market failure isn't a flaw in markets — it's a precise mapping of where the assumptions underlying market efficiency break down. Every type of market failure (externalities, public goods, monopoly, information asymmetry) corresponds to a specific violated assumption, which means the diagnosis itself points toward the remedy. The deeper insight is that markets are an information-processing technology, and they fail when prices can't encode the full cost or value of a transaction — pollution isn't priced, the seller knows more than the buyer, or one person's consumption doesn't reduce availability for others.
