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- Title
On the Origin of Property Rights.
- Authors
Guerra-Pujol, F. E.
- Abstract
The author develops a biological-institutional approach for understanding the origin of property rights. Most of the economic, anthropological, and legal literature on the emergence of aboriginal property rights focuses almost exclusively on property in land and other tangible resources, such as wildlife, foodstuffs, artifacts, and so on. This paper, in contrast, locates the origin of property rights in human mating behavior--specifically, the institution of 'pair-bonding'. In essence, pair bonds are proprietary in nature and the proprietariness of pair-bending is a function of female reproductive scarcity and of the search costs (or 'mating investment') required to select a mate.
- Subjects
PROPERTY rights; MARRIAGE; HUMAN reproduction; TRANSACTION costs; POLYGYNY
- Publication
Revista de Derecho Puertorriqueño, 2007, Vol 47, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
0034-7930
- Publication type
Article