A nonrival good in economics is one where one party's use of the good does not diminish another's access to it or benefit from it. Like many economic concepts it is an ideal; different goods approach this status in different degrees. Being nonrival is one of the requirements for a good to be a public good. The other requirement is that the good be a non-excludable good. Economics (from the Greek οίκος [oikos], house, and νομος [nomos], rule, hence household management) is a social science that studies the production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services. ... In economics, a public good is a good that is hard or even impossible to produce for private profit, because the market fails to account for its large beneficial externalities. ... Non-excludable goods are defined in economics as goods whereby it is impossible to stop a person consuming that good when it has become publicly available at a relatively low cost. ...
An example of a pure nonrival good is knowledge that has existed long enough to be in the public domain. The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ...
A nonrivalgood, on the other hand, is characterized by the fact that that its use or consumption by one person or in one process doesn't reduce the amount of it that can be consumed by another.
A nonrivalgood can be as simple as the time of day -- if I tell you what time it is, I don't lose track of it myself -- or as complicated as the design of the wristwatch I consult in order to tell you.
Good questions, when a cholesterol-busting compound similar to Lipitor could be produced for a tiny fraction of the price and even introduced into the communal water supply, like fluoride, as a truly public good.
Examples of goods where excluding users is very costly include the ozone layer, the global climate system, the hydrological cycle, the biogeochemical cycles, biodiversity, air quality, water quality, ocean fish, national defense, public health, radio broadcasts, and street lighting.
It may be technically possible to exclude the additional users of some nonrivalgoods (e.g., library, zoo, park), but the benefits of their use will be foregone.
For a public good, each unit of the good is being shared so we add up the price each individual is willing to pay for that unit across all the individuals sharing it.
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