Think about the oldest and most familiar principles of American law, property and proportional liability, in a new and surprising way, and learn to apply economic reasoning to an especially important and interesting aspect of life.
Creating New Property
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來自 Wesleyan University 的課程
产权与债务：法律与经济学概论
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從本節課中
Property
Property is where law and economics meet, but it's not a simple concept. Property is not an object or a relation between people and objects, but a set of rights, relations among people over who is to control each of the many uses to which objects can be put. Different people may control different uses of an object, that is, have different property rights over its various uses, at the same time, or control the same use of the object at different times. When new uses create disputes, the law must define new property rights and allocate them initially to resolve the dispute – someone must be deemed to have won the dispute and be given initial ownership of the new rights. But once the former disputants are allowed to trade these rights among themselves, surprising results follow.
與講師見面
Richard AdelsteinProfessor
Department of Economics
Hi everyone. Welcome back.
At the end of the last lecture, in which we explicated the new view of property as
rights to use an object, we made some interesting points.
We said that different people could hold different property rights to the same
object at the same time. We said that different people could hold
the same property right to the same object at different times.
And as a result of this, there was potentially an infinite number of property
rights associated with every object. One for each real and potential use of the
objects. Some points to note about this, about this
view of rights as we've elaborated it. First of them is to note that indeed there
is potentially an infinite number of rights associated with any particular
object, not just the three that are associated with ownership in the old view.
So in the older view, we have property rights to possession, property rights to
use, property rights to disposition. And those categories are extremely broad.
Now, property rights are defined much more narrowly in terms of particular individual
uses, so there are many, many more of them.
And because there are so many more of them, there is many more opportunities to
trade them amongst individuals. And indeed, this is one of the reasons
that the new view tended to displace the old view, because it was friendlier to
commerce and made it possible for people to buy and sell rights to use particular
objects in ever finer and more nuanced ways.
Finally, to note that the new view, at least as we've discussed it, clearly
separates property from objects. That is, the fact that there is so many
property rights associated with so many uses, over so many different times
potentially, potentially stretch, stretching infinitely into the future.
Excuse me. Suggests that it's not the object that's
important in property, but each and, on every one of those individual rights.
So, one way to think about them is to think about every object as carrying with
it or having associated with it, a quiver of rights, as the picture suggest,
suggests. That is, we can imagine each of the
property rights as an arrow and each arrow is associated with a different use of the
of the object in question and in principle at a different point in time as well.
In the picture, there are just a few arrows in the quiver, but as we've said,
when we're talking about property rights, particularly for complex objects like
buildings and such. There is a very large number of arrows and
ownership of each of the arrows can be distributed around across large numbers of
people. So, with this image of rights, property
rights as representing a bundle of, of arrows or a quiver of arrows.
Let's ask the final question in this, portion of the course.
And that is, how are new rights created? I've suggested that there is a different
property right for every potential use of an object.
And so, the question then becomes, how is it that, the new uses become the subject
of, of property rights, and how are those property rights to new uses of objects how
are those distributed, how are they created, generally speaking?
So, let me offer an example and the example comes from one of my favorite
cultural artifacts in American history. It's the wonderful television program of
the 60s, Star Trek. You'll recall that Star Trek starred
Captain Kirk and his hearty crew on the Starship Enterprise.
One of whom was Commander Montgomery Scott, who was the chief engineer of the
Enterprise. And Scotty was in charge of the
transporter machine on the Enterprise. The transporter machine was a machine that
enabled people or objects to be transported almost instantaneously from
one point in space across vast distances to other points in space.
And the way that the machine accomplished this, as you can see in the picture, was
to decompose the bodies of the people who were being transported, and then to
reconstruct the molecules of, of, the, individual's body, at the point that had
been specified in the machine. So when the machine worked it would
decompose your body into molecules. It would have programmed into it the point
where you were suppose to be put back together again, and in a second or 2 you
would be reconstructed as it were in the place.
It was a lovely machine. It figured in many of the adventures of
the crew of the starship Enterprise. And interestingly it made a great deal of
noise when it worked. So when Scotty turned the dial and beamed
Kirk down or up from the ship to another planet it would sound something like this.
And then they'd be off and reconstructed wherever it was that their coordinates had
specified. So, the question now becomes, let's go
back to Nicole's, excuse me, to Simone's dormitory room and ask whether indeed
Simone has the right to use a transporter machine in her room.
And of course, this question doesn't make a great deal of sense at first glance,
because, of course, there are no real transporter machines; they're just a
figment of our imagination, at least until this point.
And so, because there is no transporter machine, no one's ever really tried to
assert the right to use one in Simone's room.
Simone has never tried to use it, nor has anyone in Mike's crew ever tried to use
it. Indeed, no one has ever tried to use the
machine in her room, because there is no such machine.
But let's suppose that in the near future somebody is actually able to construct a
transporter machine that operates in the way that I've described.
And Simone happens to come into possession of one of these machines and asks to use
it in her room. Well, indeed, she doesn't ask.
What she does is to simply use it, and when she uses it as you've seen, it makes
that noise. And when it makes that noise, we'll
hypothesize, Simone's next door neighbor comes knocking on her door, and says, that
machine you're using in there Simone. It's pretty noisy, and when you use it,
it's hard for us to study in our rooms. So would you please refrain from using the
machine? Simone perhaps wanting to keep good
relations with her neighbors might agree to that in which case the dispute would be
resolved and Simone might go back and think that she has surrendered her
interest to the interest of her neighbors and done that to keep the peace
Alternatively, Simone may decide well, it's my room, I'd like to use a
transporter machine. Let's hypothesize that transporter
machines are not illegal. Sso, without anyone else to tell her that
she can't do it, Simone says, it's my room, I'll use the transporter machine if
I'd like. And, if you can't study1 while I'm using
the machine, because of the noise, well, generally, that's tough.
If Simone take's this point of view then the neighbors may decide to yield.
Well, okay Simone, we'll recognize your right to do this just to keep the peace.
But they too may say, no sir, we don't want to submit to this.
We expect to be able to use our room in the way that we contracted with Mike to
use the room. We expect to be able to study and Simone,
by using the transporter machine, has made it impossible for us to do so.
And so what will happen? They'll have to get somebody to say, who
has the right to use the transporter machine?
If Simone gets the right to use the transporter machine, she can use it
whether her neighbors object to it or not. But if her neighbors get the right to use
the transporter machine in Simone's room, then they can exercise that property right
negatively and exclude Simone from using the transporter machine in what would
otherwise be her room. How, typically, do we find out who is the
proper owner or the initial owner of the transporter machine right?
Well,in the United States we typically go to a legal authority as we'll hypothesize
in the next lecture of court. And so we can image that courts make
decisions to resolve disputes like those between Simone and her neighbors over the
operation of the transporter machine over and over and over again.
And when those disputes are resolved, the judge makes an authoritative decision,
either that Simone has the property right to use the transporter machine in her
room, without the consent or permission of her neighbors.
Or alternatively that the neighbors have the right to keep Simone from using a
transporter machine in her room without the permission of the neighbors.
We can imagine that the judges have sitting in their chambers a quiver of
empty, non-assigned property rights, a quiver of arrows that have no labels on
them. But once a decision is made, in the
dispute between Simone and her neighbors over who has the right to use the
transporter machine in Simone's room. The effect of that decision would have
been that the judge would have taken one of those arrows out of the quiver in her
chambers. Put a label on that arrow that says, the
bearer of this arrow has the right to use the transporter machine in the, in
Simone's room. And then, the judge, by deciding the case
would have given that arrow, given that property right to one or another of the
contesting parties. That's how new property rights are
created. And in the next lecture, I'll expand on
this idea and suggest a surprising result about the creation of new property rights.
