Property, efficiency, the commons, and theft

Ramsi A. Woodcock

Chapter 21 in Research Handbook on Law and Political Economy, 2025, pp 340-369 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Economists tell two stories that suggest that property and intellectual property are necessary and sufficient for efficiency. But these two stories, the Tragedy of the Commons and the Parable of Theft, do not actually support that conclusion. The Tragedy of the Commons does not establish the necessity of property because the story applies only if later entrants reduce the enjoyment of earlier entrants. This effect, which I call spreading, is not a universal attribute of all resources, however. The Parable of Theft has a different defect. It must assume that people do not always strike mutually beneficial deals, otherwise society would buy out all thieves and there would be no need for property law to protect producers from them. But if people do not always strike mutually beneficial deals, then giving property rights to producers will prevent their output from flowing, via trade, to those who value it the most.

Keywords: Tragedy of the commons; Parable of theft; Property; Intellectual property; Efficiency; Trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781803921181
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781803921198.00032 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21466_21

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().