Too many owners ?

Those of us in software understand the concept of fragmentation all too well. But can the same concept apply to ownership of resources like real estate, wireless spectrum and patents ? Yes, says Professor Michael Heller of Columbia University.

And from Ethan Zuckerman comes an interesting book summary/review of Michael Heller’s new book “The Gridlock Economy“.

Heller believes that a common thread in all of these cases is the disappearance of a tight linkage between ownershpi and use. In the past, there was little distance between the patent and the product, the land ownership and the property development. But innovation these days is about assembing resources. You need multiple pieces of protected property to achieve innovation in semiconductors, drug discovery, software or telecoms. It’s true in the arts as well, with the rise of the maship, and illustrated by the difficulty of releasing documentary films. See the difficulties regarding the docmentary Eyes on the Prize, due to copyright issues.

To describe this situation, Heller has coined the phrase, “The Tragedy of the Anticommons”. This is in contrast to the tragedy of the commons: when anyone can use a resource, it’s likely to get overused. With too few owners, overuse is a common outcome, because rational individuals will prioritize their needs over collective goods. This was a critical insight for environmentalists in the 1960s, helping unite a large number of environmental problems into a common phenomenon. Private property was often prescribed as a solution to tragedy of the commons solutions, assuming that a property owner would consider long-term implications of development for her property rather than permitting overuse.

Heller argues that, in many cases, we’ve skated right past private property and into anti-commons, characterized by underuse. If we’ve got too many owners, there can be too little use of a resource. We don’t see the anti-commons tragedy as clearly, as it’s characterized by the absence of innovation. “Where do you go to protest that a drug didn’t come to market or to complain that your cellphone is so poor?” With this new concept, Heller hopes to rope together a set of disparate problems with a similar set of ownership structures.

…My heart’s in Accra.