Club goods (also artificially scarce goods, toll goods or quasi-public goods) are a type of good in economics, that are excludable (unlike public goods) but non-rivalrous, at least until reaching a point where congestion occurs. Often these goods exhibit high excludability, but at the same time low rivalry in consumption. Thus, club goods have essentially zero marginal costs and are generally provided by what is commonly known as natural monopolies. Furthermore, club goods have artificial scarcity. Club theory is the area of economics that studies these goods. One of the most famous provisions was published by Buchanan in 1965 "An Economic Theory of Clubs," in which he addresses the question of how the size of the group influences the voluntary provision of a public good and more fundamentally provides a theoretical structure of communal or collective ownership-consumption arrangements.

Club goods are often excluded in order to get people to pay either by nonprofits in order to cover their fixed costs or by for-profit entities to make a profit. For example if you don’t pay for software, you can't download it. If you don’t buy a concert ticket, you can't enter the concert. Although club good marginal cost can be negligible, there will almost always be a deadweight loss from controlling access to it. A cost is imposed on consumers and another cost is borne by providers (from enforcing the mechanisms for exclusion). For toll roads there is the tollbooth installation cost. For software, this deadweight loss arises through the cost of technological measures like encrypting software or digital rights management.

Examples of club goods include cinemas, cable television, software as a service, access to copyrighted works, and the services provided by social or religious clubs to their members. The EU is also treated as a club good, since the services it provides can be excluded from non-EU member states, but several services are nonrival in consumption. These include the free movement of goods, services, persons and capital within the Internal Market, and participation in a common currency: for example, adding extra countries to the Schengen Area would not make it more difficult for citizens of current EU members to move between countries.

Public goods with benefits restricted to a specific group may be considered club goods. For example, expenditures that benefit all of the children in a household but not the adults. The existence of club goods for children may offset the effects of sibling competition for private investments in larger families. While a large number of children in a family would usually reduce private investment ratios per child, due to competition for resources, the effects of a larger family on club goods are not as straightforward. As a result of economies of scale, investment ratios in club goods may eventually increase, since the relative price decreases when, in this example, a larger family consumes a club good. They are called child-specific goods and can also be referred to as club goods.

Private club good examples are memberships in gyms, golf clubs, or swimming pools. Both organisations generate additional fees per use. For example, a person may not use a swimming pool very regularly. Therefore, instead of having a private pool, you become member of a club pool. By charging membership fees, every club member pays for the pool, making it a common property resource, but still excludable, since only members are allowed to use it. Hence, the service is excludable, but it is nonetheless nonrival in consumption, at least until a certain level of congestion is reached. The idea is that individual consumption and payment is low, but aggregate consumption enables economies of scale and drives down unit production costs.

James M. Buchanan developed club theory (the study of club goods in economics) in his 1965 paper, "An Economic Theory of Clubs". He found that in neo-classical economic theory and theoretical welfare economics is exclusively about private property and all goods and services are privately consumed or utilized. Just over the two decades before his provision in 1965, scholars started to extend the theoretical framework and communal or collective ownership-consumption arrangements were considered as well.

Paul A. Samuelson made an important provision in this regard, making a sharp conceptual distinction between goods that are purely private and goods that are purely public. While it extended the previously existing theoretical framework, Buchanan found that there was still a missing link that would cover the whole spectrum of ownership consumption possibilities. This gap contained goods that were excludable, shared by more people than typically share a private good, but fewer people than typically share a public good. The whole spectrum would cover purely private activities on one side and purely public or collectivized activities on the other side. Therefore, according to Buchanan, a theory of clubs needed to be added to the field.

The goal of his theory was to address the question of determining the "size of the most desirable cost and consumption sharing arrangement".