Under what circumstances will villagers co-operate to supply themselves with goods and services that they all need but could not provide for themselves individually? In what circumstances are those who face a potential 'tragedy of the commons' able to organise a system of rules by which the tragedy is averted? Many writers on collective action and common property consider that these circumstanc...

Conventional wisdom suggests that, as the value of a natural resource rises, private property will emerge. The Ngwa and other Igbo groups of Nigeria, however, curtailed private rights over palm trees in response to the palm produce trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I present a game between property owners and potential thieves in which an increase in the price of a natural ...

This paper argues that successful conservation of wetlands is fundamentally determined by the institutions and property rights associated with resource management decisions. Thus an understanding of property rights regimes, the constraints which they impose on users of wetlands resources, and the distribution of benefits of use among users and non-users are essential if the economic values of w...

We investigate the social desirability of free entry in the co-opetition model in which firms compete in a homogeneous product market while sharing common property resources that affect market size or consumers’ willingness to pay for products. We show that free entry leads to socially excessive or insufficient entry into the market in the case of non-commitment co-opetition, depending on the m...

This conceptual paper introduces the important link between law and knowledge resources. We analyse the three key types of institutions: common law, civil law, and social norms, conventions and how they define the nature of property rights for knowledge resources and assets. Knowledge, because of its intangible nature and value, raises fundamental issues of, measurement and property rights that...