Quotes from “Toward a Theory of Property Rights”

By Harold Demsetz (1967)

• Property rights are an instrument of society and derive their significance from the fact that they help a man form those expectations which he can reasonably hold in his dealings with others.#
  EconomicsLawExpectations
• The emergence of property rights can be understood best by their association with the emergence of new or different beneficial and harmful effects.#
  Law
• An increase in the number of owners is an increase in the communality of property and leads, generally, to an increase in the cost of internalizing.#
  Economics
• What converts a harmful or beneficial effect into an externality is that the cost of bringing the effect to bear on the decisions of one or more of the interacting parties is too high to make it worthwhile.#Quoted in Tom Palmer, “The Hermeneutical View of Freedom” (1990)
  Economics