摘要：Economic inefficiencies are often attributed to ill-defined property rights. However, perfectly-defined property rights will not necessarily lead to economic efficiency. Rather, some resourcesare more efficiently exploited if jointly owned by a large group of persons, while others are moreefficiently exploited if divided up and distributed to individual parties. We present an economicframework whereby the efficiency of a property rights regime is couched in terms of the optimallevel of dispersion of a bundle of property right "sticks," and the party or parties that will makethe most efficient use of those "sticks." A low level of dispersion indicates that a bundle of rightsassociated with a resource is relatively intact and consolidated. When such a consolidated bundleis held by a very large group of persons, we have a property rights regime akin to open access,which is prone to overexploitation of the resource, or a "tragedy of the commons." Such a regimeis characterized by many persons holding coterminous and indivisible rights of use, and nonehaving any effective right of exclusion. The antithesis of this situation is where the bundle ofrights to a resource is dispersed among multiple individuals, such that no individual has aneffective right of use and each has an effective right of exclusion, resulting in chronicunderexploitation, or what has been called a "tragedy of the anticommons." An example of thiscan be found in the commercial shopping district in Moscow, where different parties may holdseparate rights to use, sell, lease and hold title to a parcel of commercial property, with the resultthat the property goes unused.
