Economic Analysis of Property Rights

The standard neoclassical model of economics is incapable of explaining why one form of organization arises over another. It is a model where transaction costs are implicitly assumed to not exist; however, transaction costs are here defined as the costs of strengthening a given distribution of economic property rights, and they always exist. Economic Analysis of Property Rights is a study of how individuals organise resources to maximise the value of their economic rights over these resources. It offers a unified theoretical structure to deal with exchange, rights formation, and organisation that traditional economic theory often ignores. It explains how transaction costs can be reduced through reorganization and, in the end, how the distribution of property rights that exists is the one that maximizes wealth net of these transaction costs. This necessary hypothesis explains much of the puzzling organizations and institutions that exist now and have existed in the past.

Yoram Barzel (1931–2022) was Professor Emeritus of the University of Washington. He published extensively, and helped create the field of economic property rights. He published A Theory of the State (Cambridge, 2002), was president of the Western Economic Association in 2001, and winner of the Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017. Douglas W. Allen is Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics, Simon Fraser University. He has contributed to the theory of transaction costs and property rights in over ninety publications. His books include The Institutional Revolution (Chicago, 2012) which won the Douglass North 2014 book prize.