Como surgem os direitos de propriedade?

Belo paper do grande Herschel Grossman (pdf): Property Rights under Anarchy

Resumo: Traditionally, general-equilibrium models have taken effective property rights to be given and have been concerned only with analyzing the allocation of resources among productive uses and the distribution of the resulting product. But, this formulation of the economic problem is incomplete because it neglects that the appropriative activities by which people create the effective property rights that inform allocation and distribution are an alternative to productive activities. This paper develops two canonical general-equilibrium models that allow for the allocation of time and effort to the creation of effective property rights to valuable resources. In one model the valuable resources are initially in a common pool. In the other model agents initially have nonoverlapping claims to the valuable resources. For both models the analysis reveals how the amount of time and effort that agents allocate to appropriative activities depends on the environment for creating effective property rights, on the technology of production, and on the scale of the economy. The paper also analyzes the security of initial claims to valuable resources and speculates about why initial claims sometimes are perfectly secure.