University of Michigan Legal Working Paper Series
University of Michigan John M. Olin Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series
Evolutionary Theory and the Origin of Property Rights
Abstract
Legal scholars have never settled on a satisfactory account of the evolution of property rights. The touchstone for virtually all discussion, Harold Demsetz’s Toward a Theory of Property Rights, has a number of well-known (and not so well-known) shortcomings, perhaps because it was never intended to be taken as an evolutionary explanation in the first place. There is, in principle at least, a pretty straightforward fix for the sort of evolutionary approach pursued by followers of Demsetz, but even then that approach – call it the conventional approach – fails to account for very early property rights, right at the genesis. The early developments are better explained by a very different approach based on evolutionary game theory. The game theoretic approach can account for a basic system of property rights rooted in possession; it cannot, however, account for complex property systems. To explain the latter requires the conventional approach. Hence, the two approaches combined suggest a satisfactory account of the origins and development of property rights systems.
Subject Area
Law and Economics, Property-Personal and Real, Public Law and Legal Theory
Recommended Citation
James E. Krier,
"Evolutionary Theory and the Origin of Property Rights"
(April 2009).
University of Michigan Legal Working Paper Series.
University of Michigan John M. Olin Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series.
Working Paper 98.
http://law.bepress.com/umichlwps/olin/art98
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