This book by Daniel Cole and Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics,shows how property rights systems affect the use of scarce natural resources. It is a richsource of information for those involved in conservation, land dispute resolution, landmarket regulation, public...

The institutional and ecological structure of Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” appears deceptively simple: the open-access pasture eventually will be overexploited and degraded unless (i) it is privatized, (ii) the government regulates access and use, or (iii) the users themselves impose...

Property theory has not kept pace with the growth of empirical and historical information on property systems. This paper, prepared for a Lincoln Institute conference on "The Evolution of Property Systems and Rights Related to Land and Natural Resources": (a) introduces conventional theories of...