Property Rights: Cooperation, Conflict, and Law
本书探讨理性个体在稀缺资源竞争下如何通过暴力、规范或政治制度确立产权规则，并运用边际原则进行成本收益选择，适合研究产权、交易成本与制度演化的学者。
This book looks at the significance and evolution of property rights. It explores the theme that rational individuals who compete for scarce resources need some rules to regulate and govern the resulting competition. Such rules can possibly include, violence, ‘might is right’, societal norms, or formal and informal property rights defined by some political institutions such as a government. The choice among the many diverse rules is a cost‐benefit decision that applies the standard ‘marginal principle’. The book has thirteen chapters which are in turn organised into six parts. In Part I, Edwin West looks at the views of the classical economists on the issue of property rights; relative to modern neoclassical economics, their emphasis is on the normative basis for property rights. Yoram Barzel argues for the importance of incorporating transaction costs (defined as the resources used to establish and maintain property rights) into the neoclassical competitive model. He also illustrates and extends Cheung’s argument about the difficulty of separating transactions that occur within firms and markets, an issue that lies at the heart of the modern theory of the firm.