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The market is a complex organism that has rich implications and essential stipulations. From the property right perspective, the market is a series of property rights, rules, and system arrangements (an aggregation of rights), which are constructed, owned, operated, and managed by the state and from which the government can benefit. The market property right is owned by the government (state). The costs of market property right include tangible (explicit) cost, system cost, human cost, and other cost components. The study on the cost components of market property right is conducive to establishing the principle of matching investment with ownership, matching investment with income, and integrating (unifying) cost with efficiency.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

Clearly defined and enforceable property rights are commonly recognized as prerequisites to economic calculation and the market process. The purpose of this paper is to argue that when entrepreneurs add or subtract certain rights from the bundle of rights that constitute a property right they face a classic planner’s dilemma: the need to separate the technologically possible from the economically feasible. Traditionally, prices provide the signals needed to resolve the planners dilemma, but because prices refer to the entire bundle of rights that constitutes property, the entrepreneur is unable to immediately identify the combination of rights that isolates the attribute of a good consumers desire to purchase. Creating new bundles of property rights results in new prices, which generate new information essential to further developing economically viable arrangements of property rights; hence, property rights are dynamic.

The paper develops the theory of dynamic property rights, and then offers two case studies that illustrate different elements in the theory. One case study applies the theory to productive entrepreneurship, specifically in the sharing economy. The second case study applies the theory to protective entrepreneurship via a historical study of land title use in England and France. The author concludes with policy implications.

Recognizing that property rights are dynamic has several important implications. Restricting the bundling or de-bundling of property rights is a form of intervention in the market process equivalent to price fixing. Similarly, efforts to support property rights protecting institutions need to account for the fact that property rights bundles are not necessarily static but control over them needs to be stable and predictable. Finally, a more robust and accurate conceptualization of the marking process and what it means to “economize” on scarce resources does not just include the efficient allocation of property rights, but also the efficient allocation of the underlying rights bundles themselves.

A dynamic theory of property rights allows the author to understand how property rights evolve and offer an account of different property rights regimes by highlight the living connection between productive and protective entrepreneurship.

This paper aims to integrate ideas from market process theory with entrepreneurship and institutional evolution. The paper extends the ideas in the UCLA property rights school to illuminate two case studies – one highly relevant to current policy makers, and the other relevant to development economists.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate farmers’ attitudes and behavior toward land titling and to study its potential effects on rural development.

Using household survey data collected from five provinces of China in 2010, this paper assesses farmer’s attitudes toward land titling and examines the potential effects of land titling on rural land transferring and labor migration.

Rural residential land titling has significant effects on farmers’ attitudes toward land transferring and their migration intention. Farmers who have more non-agricultural development opportunities are more likely to welcome land titling. The titling of rural residential land could provide secure property rights for farmers, and thus stimulate them to trade, mortgage their rural residential property, and migrate to urban areas.

Land titling in rural China will probably affect rural land transferring and encourage rural labor migrate to urban, and thus promote rural development.

This paper investigates farmers’ attitudes and behavior toward land titling, and examines its potential effects on rural land transferring and labor migration, based on national survey data. This paper sheds new lights on farmers’ demand for types of land tenure reforms and how these reforms would affect the perceived opportunities available for farmers.

Throughout history, social philosophers have justified titles of possession by the right of occupation, labour, and social contract, while the economic justification rests on efficiency grounds. Subscribing to the extremely contestable argument that there is a connection between private property rights and the performance and prosperity of capitalism, de‐socialization of ownership was to become the backbone for market oriented reforms in post‐communist society. The absence of clearly defined property rights, their capricious enforcement, widespread cronyism and criminal activity, in combination with a lack of resolution to terminate the quasi‐property rights of the former ruling elite, and imperfect markets have created a situation where, in the final analysis, the original foundation of most rights to property and wealth would hardly survive the test of justice and be validated in any socially responsible society. Moral precepts aside, given these circumstances, it would be hard for an economist to argue that the present process of re‐allocation of rights could be explained on efficiency grounds.

The paper aims to examine how the theory of institutional economics is used to analyze and explain how the canola industry has developed and changed over the past 30 years, in order to highlight the important role of extra‐market institutions in innovation processes.

The theory of transactions and institutions is examined, specifically the concepts of rivalry, excludability and voice, in order to identify optimal institutions to address potential market failures in new product development.

In the pre‐biotechnology period, missing links in the supply chain and the absence of private property rights contributed to public good market failures; the resulting market failures and inadequate investment incentives were overcome by development of public research programs and new participatory institutions that managed research coordination, extension and market development. In the biotechnology‐phase, private property rights, vertical integration and contracting resolved many of the earlier market failures but failures in research coordination, enforcement of property rights and marketing have required new institutions.

The development of the highly innovative Canadian canola supply chain over the past 50 years – encompassing a period of public‐sector‐based, conventional plant breeding and, more recently, a privately‐directed biotechnology‐based phase – highlights the role that different institutional structures can play in product innovation.

This study of the canola chain offers insights into how different types of market failures arise at various stages of development, requiring new institutions to address these failures, and provides lessons on how to foster the development of other innovative agri‐food supply chains around the world.

This article mainly discusses market growth in the Chinese economy. The author analyses the difficulties of Chinese marketing reform, and points out that the key to market growth is not perfection of the market system but establishment of a market base. Without a property right system, a market system will not perform efficiently. Therefore market growth cannot be a natural course of system conversion in China. Many system obstacles are hindering market growth. Chinese market growth must experience a social system reform in order to nurture a new market system.

This chapter provides a selective survey of the theoretical and empirical literature to date on the relationship between intellectual property rights (IPRs) and measures of innovation and international technology transfer. The chapter discusses the empirical implications of theoretical work, assesses the theoretical work based on the evidence available, and identifies some gaps in the existing literature.

As electronic commerce expands, credible property rights in key sectors are necessary. This article identifies three layers of an electronic commerce network – infrastructure, commercial services, and trust – and then outlines five conditions of property rights that are being fulfilled in varying degrees in the developed and developing worlds. The main challenge for the developing world is to concentrate on adequate infrastructural provision. The challenge for the developed world is in determining appropriate property rights for the supportive commercial services needed for electronic commerce as well as issues of consumer and business trust. Given the global nature of electronic commercial transactions, both developed and developing countries are involved in framing rules at the global level that resonate and are credible with domestic conditions and institutions.

This article aims at analysing the different institutional aspects of the rural land market that are manifest at the transactional level. Second, it answers the question whether including these aspects in a land price model increases the understanding of rural land market outcomes. Institutional economics scholars have challenged the limited institutional behaviour of conventional land market models. Despite their research methods remaining primarily qualitative, research findings suggest that we should look at institutional aspects to understand land and real estate market outcomes better.

This paper presents a hedonic price model explaining rural land prices by using individual institutional transaction aspects from the deeds of purchase of the land exchange.

The results indicate that incorporating institutional aspects, such as property rights, transactional arrangements and governance context, as explanatory variables significantly improves the power of the model.

The approach taken in this article is new in the sense that it tries to combine a quantitative research method with a rich data set of a more qualitative character. The use of deeds of purchase as a primary source of a hedonic price model is relatively new and provides a first step in bridging the gap between advanced hedonic land price models and rich institutional economic insights in market processes.