I consider a model in which an asset owner must decide how much to invest in his asset mindful of the fact that an encroacher’s valuation of the asset is increasing in the asset owner’s investment. Due to incomplete property rights, the encroacher and asset owner engage in a contest over the control of the asset after investment has taken place. A standard result is that the asset owner will un...

Intellectual property rights (IPR) of computer software is the right to assign the software to its creator, not limited to time and space, and non-transferable. Proving IPR of the creators of computer software requires a rigorous review of the ways in which these rights may be violated. The present study was conducted by comparing two populations in Iran with the aim of identifying the level of...

This paper establishes a nexus between the established fields of constitutional political economy and macroeconomic capital theory. Constitutional political economy explores how legal and institutional structures emerge over time. The evolution of property rights has always been a central focus of this line of inquiry. Time preference is one of the most basic economic concepts. Theories of inte...

In developing countries, the extent to which women possess property rights is shaped in large part by transfers received at the time of marriage. Focusing on dowry, we develop a simple model of the marriage market with intrahousehold bargaining to understand the incentives for brides’ parents to allocate the rights over the dowry between their daughter and her groom. In doing so, we clarify and...

Many emergent ventures, such as social networks, leverage crowd-sourced information assets as essential pillars supporting their business models. The appropriation of rights to information assets through legal contracts often fails to prevent conflicts between the users and the companies that claim information rights. In this paper, we focus on social networks and examine why those conflicts ar...

The high profile investment claims filed by Philip Morris challenging Uruguayan and Australian measures that restrict advertising and logos on tobacco packaging awakened the public health community to the existence and potential detrimental impact of international investment agreements (IIAs). More recently, Eli Lilly challenged Canada's invalidation of a pharmaceutical patent under an IIA. All...

results of an evaluation of the impact of agricultural science and technology (as and t) policy system institutions on efficiency and technical change in kenyan and ugandan agriculture are presented here. data envelopment analysis was used to derive efficiency and technical change and logistic regression applied to delineate as and t institutions that induced efficiency and technical progress. ...