The Tragedy of the Anti-Commons: A New Problem. An Application to the Fisheries

José António Filipe, Manuel Alberto M. Ferreira and Manuel Coelho

No 2007/16, Working Papers Department of Economics from ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Universidade de Lisboa

Abstract: The operation and management of common property resources (“the commons”) have been exhaustively examined in economics and political science, both in formal analysis and in practical applications. “Tragedy of the Commons” metaphor helps to explain why people overuse shared resources. On the other side, Anti-Commons Theory is a recent theory presented by scientists to explain several situations about new Property Rights concerns. An “anti-commons” problem arises when there are multiple rights to exclude. Little attention has been given to the setting where more than one person is assigned with exclusion rights, which may be exercised. We analyze the “anti-commons” problem in which resources are inefficiently underutilized rather than over-utilized as in the familiar commons setting. In fact, these two problems are symmetrical in several aspects.

Keywords: Anti-Commons Theory; Property Rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-env, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
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More papers in Working Papers Department of Economics from ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Universidade de Lisboa Department of Economics, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Universidade de Lisboa, Rua do Quelhas 6, 1200-781 LISBON, PORTUGAL.
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