Economic Analysis of Property Rights

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.

• Part I. Conceptual Issues: 1. The Neoclassical Problem; 2. Economic Property Rights; 3 : Transaction Costs; 4. Information Costs; 5. The Theory of Economic Property Rights; Part II. Contracts, Organizations, and Institutions: 6. Exchange, Contracts, and Contract Choice; 7. Divided Ownership and Organization; 8. Institutions; Part III. Establishing Property Rights: 9. Capture in the Public Domain; 10. Forming Property Rights; 11. Benefits of the Public Domain; Part IV. Non Price Allocation and Other Issues: 12. Non-wage Labor Markets; 13. Property Rights in Non-Market Allocations; 14. Additional Property Rights Applications; 15. The Property Rights Model; Bibliography; Index.

'This new Third Edition of Economic Analysis of Property Rights carries one of the greatest classics of economics into the twenty-first century. Starting with unusually rigorous definitions of transaction costs, property rights, and resources, Barzel and Allen lay out a fruitful framework for analyzing institutions and employ it to generate a stunning array of insights into a wide variety of real-world situations. This book is essential reading for economists, legal scholars, policymakers, and anyone else who wants a fresh take on the way institutions work.' Henry E. Smith, Harvard Law School