Assigning Property Rights in the Common Pool: Implications of the Prevalence of First-Possession Rules for Itqs in Fisheries (Report‪)‬

Introduction On-going efforts to mitigate the losses of the commons in various environmental and natural resource settings have brought renewed consideration of the use of property rights arrangements. (1) These include individual transferable quotas (ITQs) in fisheries, tradable emission permits in air pollution control, and exchangeable development permits in land use planning (Tietenberg 2007, 63). While attractive because of their ability to better link private and social net benefits in decision making than is possible with traditional command-and-control regulation, property rights instruments face complicated institutional design and implementation problems.