Tragedy of the anticommons

The tragedy of the anticommons is a new phrase invention of Michael Heller. It says, that things can go bad if too many people have rights on a shared thing. It is related to the phrase tragedy of the commons, which says that things can go bad if not enough people have rights. It is a general phrase for problems like patent thickets, submarine patents, nail houses, and more red tapes. It is difficult to find solutions, but some of them are eminent domain, Laches, patent pools or other agreements on rights and copyrights.

Related pages

Tragedy of the anticommons is one of four outcomes:

	Property rights	Common ownership or lack of property rights
Bad outcome/tragedy	Tragedy of the anticommons	Tragedy of the commons
Good outcome/cornucopia	normal case	Inverse commons

The prevalent outcome depends on the details of the situation.

Rose, Carol M. (1986) The Comedy of the Commons: Commerce, Custom and Inherently Public Property, 53 Univ. of Chi. L. Rev. 711, reprinted as chapter 5 Archived 2008-07-25 at the Wayback Machine in: Rose, Carol M., Property and persuasion: Essays on the history, theory and rhetoric of ownership, Westview Press 1994
Hickman, J.; Dolman, E. (2002). "Resurrecting the Space Age: A State-Centered Commentary on the Outer Space Regime". Comparative Strategy. 21 (1): 2002. doi:10.1080/014959302317350855. S2CID 153962954.
Depoorter, B.; Parisi, F.; Schulz, N. (2003). "Fragmentation in Property: Towards a General Model" (PDF). Journal of Institutional and Theoretic Economics. 159: 594–613.
Buchanan, James; Yoon, Yong (2000). "Symmetric Tragedies: Commons and Anticommons" (PDF). Journal of Law and Economics. 43: 1. doi:10.1086/467445. JSTOR 725744. S2CID 2463182.