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Müller, Christian; Tietzel, Manfred --- "Property Rights and their Partitioning" [2005] ELECD 126; in Backhaus, G. Jürgen (ed), "The Elgar Companion to Law and Economics, Second Edition" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005)

Book Title: The Elgar Companion to Law and Economics, Second Edition

Editor(s): Backhaus, G. Jürgen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845420321

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: Property Rights and their Partitioning

Author(s): Müller, Christian; Tietzel, Manfred

Number of pages: 13

Extract:

2 Property rights and their partitioning
Christian Müller and Manfred Tietzel


Property rights can be defined as socially recognized entitlements of individ-
uals to use a good. Here, the term `property' is used in a broad sense and is
meant to encompass the relations of actors to all scarce goods yielding utility,
including rights not only to material resources but also to immaterial, human
rights such as the right to vote and that of free speech (Furubotn and Pejovich,
1974, p. 3). One commonly distinguishes between the right to use a resource
(usus), the right to appropriate returns (usus fructus), the right to change the
form and substance of assets (abusus) and the right to sell or lease some or all
of these rights to another user (alienation). Neoclassical microeconomics im-
plicitly assumes all these rights to be fully laid in the hands of one single user
and focused only on `the forces determining the price and the number of units
of a good to which these rights attach' (Demsetz, 1967, p. 347). In sharp
contrast to this, the theory of property rights (see the surveys in Furubotn and
Pejovich, 1972; DeAlessi, 1980; Tietzel, 1981; Eggertsson, 1990; Richter and
Furubotn, 1996) emphasizes the possibility of differences between entitlement
structures. For reasons discussed below it is held that any given property rights
structure functions as a system of incentives consisting of rewards and punish-
ments; this extended approach sheds light on the institutional aspects of choice
that are taken to ...