Private Storage of Common Property

Trust with Private and Common Property: Effects of Stronger Property Right Entitlements

Is mutually beneficial cooperation in trust games more prevalent with private property or common property? Does the strength of property right entitlement affect the answer? Cox, Ostrom, Walker, et al. [1] report little difference between cooperation in private and common property trust games. We assign stronger property right entitlements by requiring subjects to meet a performance quota in a ...

The Evolution of Private Property

Experimental studies have shown that subjects exhibit a systematic endowment effect. No acceptable explanation for the existence of this behavior has been offered. This paper shows that the endowment effect can be modeled as respect for private property in the absence of legal institutions ensuring third-party contract enforcement. In this sense, “natural” private property has been observed in ...

Private Information Storage

We consider the setting of hiding information through the use of multiple databases that do not interact with one another. In this setting, there are k 2 \databases" which can be accessed by some \users". Users do not keep any state information, but wish to access O(n) bits of \data". Previously, in this setting solutions for retrieval of data in the eecient manner were given, where a user achi...

Private Property and Public Interest

New Forms of Private Property: Property Rights in Environmental Goods

This entry examines the relationship between property rights and environmental protection. According to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ model, environmental pollution and resource depletion result from the inadequate specification of property rights in environmental goods. Two solutions typically are offered for averting the ‘tragedy’: (1) specify property rights (that is, privatize the commons) o...