Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote: [... "monopoly" ...]
William M. Landes and Richard Posner: ----- A property right is a legally enforceable power to exclude others from using a resource, without need to contract with them. So if A owns a pasture, he can forbid others to graze their cattle on it without having to negotiate an agreement for exclusive use. A property right confers two types of economic benefit, static and dynamic. The former is illustrated by a natural (that is, uncultivated) pasture. If the owner cannot exclude others from using his pasture, there will be overgrazing because users of the pasture will ignore the costs they impose on each other in reducing the cattle's weight by making the cattle expend more energy in grazing in order to find enough to eat. The dynamic benefit of a property right is the incentive that the right imparts to invest in the creation or improvement of a resource in period 1 (for example, planting a crop), given that no one else can appropriate the resource in period 2 (harvest time). For example, a firm is less likely to expend resources on developing a new product if competing firms that have not borne the expense of development can duplicate the product and produce it at the same marginal cost as the innovator; competition will drive price down to marginal cost, and the sunk costs of invention will not be recouped. ----- regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ Gnu-misc-discuss mailing list Gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
