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What are ‘property rights’, and why do they matter? A comment on Hodgson's article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2015

YORAM BARZEL
YORAM BARZEL*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Washington, Seattle, USA
*
*Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This comment divides ‘property rights’ into ‘legal rights’ and ‘economic rights’ in order to distinguish between two very different concepts that are often confounded in the literature. Because of transaction costs, neither kind of rights is ever complete. These are useful in economic analysis as maximizing individuals constantly expand and shrink them. Unlike Hodgson’s, both notions of rights adopted here are positive, useful in analyzing behavior, and not normative as Hodgson (2015) claims them to be. As used by me, they do not devalue property rights as Hodgson claims.

Type
Comment
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 719 - 723
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2015 

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References

Barzel, Y. (1997), Economic Analysis of Property Rights, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hodgson, G. M. (2015), ‘Much of the “Economics of Property Rights” Devalues Property and Legal Rights’, Journal of Institutional Economics, published online. doi:10.1017/S1744137415000028.Google Scholar