Creating, Capturing and Protecting Value: A Property Rights-based View of Competitive Strategy

This paper develops a property rights-based view of strategy (the “PRV”). A property right (or economic right) is an individual’s net valuation, in expected terms, of the ability to directly consume the services of an asset (including, e.g., a monopoly position) or consume it indirectly through exchange. Resources expended on exchanging, protecting and capturing such rights are transaction costs, so that we directly link property rights, transaction costs, and economic value. We assume that all relevant exchange is costly and that all agents maximize their property rights. We argue that economizing with transaction costs become a distinct source of value, and potentially of sustained competitive advantage in such a setting. Strategizing revolves around influencing impediments (i.e., transaction costs) to value creation. Expectations and contracting also become crucial parts of processes of creating, protecting and capturing value. We use these insights to derive a number of refutable propositions, and argue that key insights from both industrial organization economics and the resource-based view are consistent with the PRV.