ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: New Institutional Economics and the Emergence of Property Rights
Author: Meramveliotakis Giorgos
This paper sets off by identifying the general logic of the evolutionary arguments which property rights theorists invoke in their endevour to explain the origins of exclusive rights. The two main approaches used are spontaneous evolution and intentional design. Demsetz’s theory of the emergence of private property is based on the latter. It is shown that it has limited explanatory capability because it suffers from theoretical and historical inconsistencies. These inconsistencies reveal that Demsetz’s theoretical framework provides insufficient grounding for an evolutionary theory of the emergence of property rights.
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