Economic Analysis of Property Rights / Edition 2

by Yoram Barzel

Overview

This study offers a unified theoretical structure to analyze exchange, formation of economic rights, and organization. The cost of measuring accurately all assets' attributes is prohibitive. Therefore, rights are never fully delineated and others (using theft, adverse selection, free riding, and shirking) may appropriate one's assets. The central question is how people allocate resources and organize their activities to maximize the value of their rights. The approach emphasizes nonmarket constraints, but is also applicable to market economies. It is useful for analyzing allocations within organizations as well as allocation by voting and charity. Chapters have been extended for this second edition and a new chapter devoted to the firm has been added.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521597135
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/13/1997
Series:	Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.86(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

Yoram Barzel (1931–2022) was Professor Emeritus of the University of Washington. He published extensively, and helped create the field of economic property rights. He published A Theory of the State (Cambridge, 2002), was president of the Western Economic Association in 2001, and winner of the Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.

Douglas W. Allen is Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics, Simon Fraser University. He has contributed to the theory of transaction costs and property rights in over ninety publications. His books include The Institutional Revolution (Chicago, 2012) which won the Douglass North 2014 book prize.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. The property rights model; 2. The public domain: rationing by waiting and price controls; 3. Contract choice: the tenancy contract; 4. Divided ownership; 5. The old firm and the new organization; 6. The formation of rights; 7. Slavery; 8. Wealth maximization constraints on property rights; 9. Property rights and non-market allocation; 10. Additional property rights applications; 11. The property rights model: recapitulation; References.

Editorial Reviews

‘This new Third Edition of Economic Analysis of Property Rights carries one of the greatest classics of economics into the twenty-first century. Starting with unusually rigorous definitions of transaction costs, property rights, and resources, Barzel and Allen lay out a fruitful framework for analyzing institutions and employ it to generate a stunning array of insights into a wide variety of real-world situations. This book is essential reading for economists, legal scholars, policymakers, and anyone else who wants a fresh take on the way institutions work.’ Henry E. Smith, Harvard Law School

‘As is fitting for a Third Edition of Economic Analysis of Property Rights by Yoram Barzel and Douglas W. Allen, there is a lot to learn in this new volume. The authors have been leaders in the New Institutional Economics. They examine property rights, transaction costs, information costs, organizations, and institutions. They describe how these arrangements coordinate and direct economic behavior and impact human welfare. Global economic performance depends more upon property rights and related structures of production than upon demographic, intellectual, and natural resource endowments. The topics addressed in this new edition are critical for understanding why.’ Gary D. Libecap, University of California, Santa Barbara, and National Bureau of Economic Research

From the Publisher