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Disclaimer. Don't rely on these old notes in lieu of reading the literature, but they can jog your memory. As a grad student long ago, my peers and I collaborated to write and exchange summaries of political science research. I posted them to a wiki-style website. "Wikisum" is now dead but archived here. I cannot vouch for these notes' accuracy, nor can I say who wrote them.
Alchian and Demsetz. 1973. Property Right Paradigm. Journal of Economic History 33 (March): 16-27
We don't own something, we own socially-structured rights to use something in certain ways. Thus, if you "own" land, you own the right to till it, mine it, sell these rights, but not the right to throw the soil at people.
Thus, the strength of your "ownership" is merely the probability that what you want done with the land will actually be done.
This gives rise to two questions: what rights exist in a society? Who owns things (states, private citizens, communities)? The structure of rights has social consequences. For example, does ownership allow exclusion?
Under a communal system, people will try to convert communal goods into private goods (e.g. by hunting beavers from communal land--the captured beaver becomes "theirs"). Private rights can be good b/c they lead people to consider social costs. As value of a communal good rises, it is more likely to be converted to a private good--e.g. the advent of the fur trade among NW Indians
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Tags
Alchian, Armen (author) • Demsetz, Harold (author) • Economics • Property Rights • Public Goods • Externalities • Collective Action
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