Tragedy of the Anticommons
The tragedy of the anticommons is the mirror image of the tragedy of the commons: it occurs when a resource has too many owners with the right to exclude, rather than too few owners with the incentive to conserve. When multiple parties hold veto rights over a resource, the result is not overuse but underuse: the resource is fragmented, locked, and wasted because no single owner can assemble the rights needed to put it to productive use.
The concept was introduced by Michael Heller in 1998 to explain why storefronts in post-Soviet Moscow remained empty despite high demand. The reason was that multiple agencies held overlapping rights to each property, and no one could negotiate a deal because every agency had a veto. The same dynamic applies to patent thickets in biotechnology, where dozens of patents cover the components needed for a single research program, and the cost of licensing them all exceeds the value of the research. It also applies to historic preservation districts, where multiple owners and regulators can block development, and to land assembly for urban renewal, where holdouts can prevent socially beneficial projects.
The anticommons is not a rare pathology; it is the natural consequence of an excessive faith in property rights as a solution to resource problems. The tragedy of the commons is solved by creating property rights; the tragedy of the anticommons is created by creating too many property rights. The policy implication is that the optimal property regime is not the one with the most rights, but the one with the right rights—rights that are clear enough to enable use but not so fragmented that they block it.
The deeper lesson is that property rights are not a monotonic good. More rights do not always mean more efficiency; they can mean more transaction costs, more bargaining failures, and more waste. The design of property rights requires balancing the incentives for conservation against the incentives for use, and this balance depends on the characteristics of the resource, the community, and the technology of enforcement. The economists who treat property rights as a one-directional solution have not understood the problem.