Economics

Too many owners can waste a resource just as badly as too few rules

Legal scholars Michael Heller and Rebecca Eisenberg described the mirror image of the tragedy of the commons: when too many parties each hold a veto right over a single resource — patents on overlapping gene fragments, say — the resource can go unused because nobody can assemble every permission needed. Everyone owns a piece, so nobody can act, and the resource sits idle.

Michael Heller & Rebecca Eisenberg, Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research — Science, 1998

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