Tragedy of the Anticommons

You remember from a previous post (July 27, 2008), a commons is a shared resource that can be ruined if a member of a society over-uses it. This is kind of the flip side of that is the anti-commons where there are so many private property restrictions that the resource dries up from lack of use.

Wikipedia describes it this way:

The tragedy of the anticommons is a hypothetical situation where rational individuals (acting separately) collectively waste a given resource by under-utilizing it. According to proponents of the theory, this would happen when so many individuals have rights of exclusion (such as property rights) of a resource that the transaction costs of coordinating those rights overwhelm any previously existing benefit. This situation (the "anticommons") is contrasted with a commons, where many individuals have privileges of use (or the right not to be excluded) in a certain resource. The tragedy of the commons is that rational individuals, acting separately, may collectively over-utilize a scarce resource.

The term "tragedy of the anticommons" was originally coined in a 1998 Harvard Law Review article by Michael Heller, a professor at Columbia Law School. In a 1998 article in Science, Heller, along with Rebecca Eisenberg, claimed that biomedical research was one of several key areas where competing patent rights could actually prevent useful and affordable products from reaching the marketplace. Proponents of the theory claimed that too many property rights could lead to less innovation. The purported counter effect of the tragedy of the anticommons, the increased usefulness of a resource as the result of many individuals using it, has been dubbed the "comedy of the commons" by Carol M. Rose in a 1987 article that appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review. It is related to the concepts of network effects and non-rivalrous goods.

Those interested in this terrific subject should consult the Wikipedia article and follow the references given there.

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